(The global aerosol trade. Animation courtesy of NASA.)

Last year, NASA and university scientists released a study revealing that half of the airborne particles, or aerosols, in the skies above Canada and the United States come from foreign sources. (“That's a huge number — half.”) Indeed, analysis of satellite data showed that “64 million tons of dust, pollutants, and other particles cross the oceans and mix into the air over North America each year. That’s nearly as much as the estimated 69 million tons of aerosols produced domestically by natural processes, transportation, and industrial sources.”

While particulate pollution from Asia usually gets the most attention, most of the imported particles, or 88 percent (56 million tons) of the total, is naturally produced dust, which, like man-made pollution, can have a direct impact on human health, weather and climate. As you can see in the upper left screen corner of the animation embedded above, “strong source points” of these fine grains are located in central China near the Taklimakan Desert, that large gaping wound bleeding out a vermillion sea. The Hell Mouth of a grotesque earth body.


(Dust storm in the Taklimakan Desert, November 2012. Image courtesy of NASA. Source.)

It's universally accepted that high-speed surface winds kick up the fine desert particles into the air, fountaining pulverized earth all the way through the mega-cities of East Asia. If Beijing's recent airpocalypse was bad, imagine if it had been springtime, the high season of sandstorms.

But there's another culprit: China's Defense Aerosol Research Project Agency (DaRPA). Zoom in on those so-called “source points” on Google Earth, and you'll find the playgrounds of aberrant geologists, gonzo climatologists, avant-gardeners and desert shamans.

Quoting a Wikipedia article yet to be written:

The Defense Aerosol Research Projects Agency is a blue-sky thinking agency charged with developing new aerosol technologies for use by the military. Current research include [1] weather weaponization, such as granular blitzkrieg; [2] homeland soil transport through air corridors for island building in claimed extraterritorial waters; [3] nano-drones for domestic and foreign intelligence gathering; [4] dust cloud urban pacification for city-wide protests, a project codenamed Curfew; and what the international media and their beat reporters have dubbed the [5] Great Blurwall of China.

If you're wondering why the progress of the Green Wall of China has been painfully slow, if not a downright failure, one reason is the stalling attempts of DaRPA researchers, as an afforested desert would certainly ruin their experiments.

But it must be said that not all the work by DaRPA are quite so malevolent. You might recall the discovery that one of the “world's most desolate places,” the Bodele Depression in north central Africa, is keeping “one of the most lush,” the Amazon, stay lush.


(Dust storm in the Bodele Depression, December 2011. Image courtesy of NASA. Source.)

Quoting an actual article:

About half of the 40 million tons of dust that are swept across the Atlantic from the Sahara to the Amazon each year come from the Bodele Depression, a small valley that accounts for only 0.2 percent of the entire Sahara and is only 0.5 percent the size of the Amazon itself. The discovery of this surprisingly large single source of mineral dust raises many fascinating questions about how far-flung parts of the Earth system are connected, including how large the dust reservoir in the Bodele depression is, how long it has been emitting such a huge amount of dust, and how long will it continue to fertilize the Amazon.

You can go a long way in answering such questions after realizing that this foreign soil exchange, this planetary umbilical whirligig, is [6] a Land Art installation by DaRPA. An aerosol garden of earth-fountains evoking the extinct, aggregated landscapes of Gondwana, thus an art that disregards not only political boundaries but also the barriers of Deep Time.

Howling, suffocating, blinding, Marvelous, it's a Spiral Jetty for the troposphere, which just happens to be a new form of [7] mineral trade that bypasses conventional resource extraction and established global fertilizer supply chains. Counter-desertification strategies in the works. Foreign Phosphorus Aid.


(Dust storm in the Goodland, between Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Garden City, Kansas, January 2013. Source.)

The US — misinterpreting this monumental piece of performance art as a manifestation of China's African Century and BRICSmanship, the objective of which is a further entrenchment into the geopolitical spheres of Africa and South America — start their own DaRPA within the original DARPA.

(In another desert, GARPA.)