Giant dust particles from Sahara Desert found 3500 kms away in the Caribbean

Large dust particles from the Sahara Desert have been found up to 3500 km away in the Caribbean.

According to stunned researchers, this means that global climate models may have to be rethought.

The particles were nearly 50 times bigger than scientists thought was possible to be transported such a distance via global winds.

Professor Giles Harrison, Professor of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Reading, and a co-author of the study said, “These dust particles are whipped up from the Sahara Desert and carried between continents, and most people know them best when they end up settling on our cars or cause the kind of eerie orange skies we saw a year ago.”

He called for climate models to be overhauled in light of the finding

'This evidence of dust and ash being carried so far is significant because these particles influence radiation transfer around the Earth and carbon cycles in the oceans.'

The research, led by the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), is published in Science Advances.