I was standing on the second-highest point in Barbados, looking down on the surfer’s beach of Bathsheba. Big waves broke over a shoreline ringed with seaweed. The sky appeared to be a bit foggy, odd for such a sunny afternoon with no whiff of rain. Or were those clouds on the horizon?
“Those are the sands of the Sahara Desert,” our guide told us, sweeping his arm across the sky. “They start in Africa and blow across the ocean all the way to the beautiful island of Barbados.” (Our guide said “the beautiful island of Barbados” a lot.)
Over the years, I’ve learned that tour guides are often full of crap, and the risk of bad information seems indirectly related to the quality of the touring vehicle involved. In this case, we were in an open “safari” jeep with ten seats, lousy suspension, and a dent the size of a microwave oven above its rear fender. I estimated the chance of BS at 65 percent.
And yet, it turns out the guide was correct.
The Sahara by Air
As NASA verifies, in winter and spring months Saharan sand can hitch a ride on the trade winds, cross the Atlantic, and wind up in the Caribbean and even further west, including in Florida and Texas. Even Brazil, every once in a while.
Scientists estimate that 100 million tons of dust make the 3,000-plus-mile journey across the Atlantic every year. Doing some Googling and back-of-the-envelope math, that’s about as much sand as can fit in a convoy of dump trucks 125 miles long.
When the dust is high in the atmosphere, it can suppress cyclone activity. When it filters down on land, it can feed the soil with nutrients. When it gets in people’s noses, it can cause respiratory distress. The only effect I suffered was that my glasses got dirtier than usual.
Some serious scientists from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Meteorology took interest in the transit of Saharan sands to Barbados. They carried out a two-year project that placed laser sensors on two peninsulas of the island, adding fly-bys of a HALO research aircraft and data from a string of six NASA satellites.
They essentially verified that my guide was correct.
Sand Everywhere in Barbados
During our trip, we saw Saharan sands every time we stood on a peak in Barbados. It was particularly pronounced when we visited St. Nicholas Abbey, a restored sugar plantation, whose owners commanded a sweeping view of the coast.
It looked like everything was behind a not-quite-sheer scrim. Sometimes, the sand looked like a beige smear across the horizon.
Maybe it was the rum punch, but one late afternoon, sitting on our fourth-floor balcony overlooking the Atlantic, the sand in the air seemed to me a wonderful metaphor for the interconnectedness and power of the global ecosystem — a demonstration that the substance of earth itself can silently relocate from one spot on the planet to another one an ocean away.
It was also a lesson that a tour guide in a rickety safari jeep can sometimes be right. Barbados is indeed a beautiful island, as he often said — with the Saharan sands in the atmosphere or not.
You might also enjoy:
Craig Stoltz writes the Substack newsletter Eat the World.
