Saharan Dust

In European skies, Saharan Dust arrives in the guise of weather. Every spring it returns in the same forms: an orange sky, a film of dust on the windscreen, reports of an uncanny landscape. Yet Saharan Dust holds vast stretches of time. Grains of rock worn down by wind over thousands of years, the shells of diatoms from a lakebed that dried out five thousand years ago, the iron and phosphorus within them: hundreds of millions of tonnes ride the atmosphere across the sea each year. 

In 2021, ACRO, an independent French radioactivity monitoring association, detected caesium-137, an artificial isotope, in Saharan Dust that had settled in the Jura in eastern France, and pointed to the nuclear tests carried out in the Algerian Sahara in the 1960s as its source. 

The following year, researchers analysing plutonium in Saharan Dust gathered across Europe concluded that its fingerprint was closer to that of the fallout American and Soviet tests had scattered across the planet. Saharan Dust carries not the trace of a single nation but the residue of the entire atomic age.

Between 1960 and 1966, seventeen nuclear tests could be carried out at Reggane and In Ekker because the desert was taken to be empty land. But the desert has never been empty. People had long made their lives there, around its oases. Decades after the tests, ground zero can still be made out in satellite images. The waste was buried on the assumption that the sand would keep it covered. Yet the wind lifts those traces again and carries them north, where they are now and then measured, reported, and forgotten once more. Rob Nixon calls this slow violence: harm dispersed across time and space, its destruction arriving late. Caesium-137 has a half-life of thirty years; plutonium-239, one of twenty-four thousand. When the wind has passed, who is left to bear the risk?

From the reprocessing plant at La Hague on the Normandy coast to the repository planned five hundred metres down in the clay beneath Bure, in the Meuse, nuclear material is endlessly being sent somewhere. Saharan Dust travels that route in reverse. Retracing a path that runs from sky to sand, and from sand back into the ground, it moves back through time, toward us.

In European skies, Saharan Dust arrives in the guise of weather. Every spring it returns in the same forms: an orange sky, a film of dust on the windscreen, reports of an uncanny landscape. Yet Saharan Dust holds vast stretches of time. Grains of rock worn down by wind over thousands of years, the shells of diatoms from a lakebed that dried out five thousand years ago, the iron and phosphorus within them: hundreds of millions of tonnes ride the atmosphere across the sea each year. 

In 2021, ACRO, an independent French radioactivity monitoring association, detected caesium-137, an artificial isotope, in Saharan Dust that had settled in the Jura in eastern France, and pointed to the nuclear tests carried out in the Algerian Sahara in the 1960s as its source. 

The following year, researchers analysing plutonium in Saharan Dust gathered across Europe concluded that its fingerprint was closer to that of the fallout American and Soviet tests had scattered across the planet. Saharan Dust carries not the trace of a single nation but the residue of the entire atomic age.

Between 1960 and 1966, seventeen nuclear tests could be carried out at Reggane and In Ekker because the desert was taken to be empty land. But the desert has never been empty. People had long made their lives there, around its oases. Decades after the tests, ground zero can still be made out in satellite images. The waste was buried on the assumption that the sand would keep it covered. Yet the wind lifts those traces again and carries them north, where they are now and then measured, reported, and forgotten once more. Rob Nixon calls this slow violence: harm dispersed across time and space, its destruction arriving late. Caesium-137 has a half-life of thirty years; plutonium-239, one of twenty-four thousand. When the wind has passed, who is left to bear the risk?

From the reprocessing plant at La Hague on the Normandy coast to the repository planned five hundred metres down in the clay beneath Bure, in the Meuse, nuclear material is endlessly being sent somewhere. Saharan Dust travels that route in reverse. Retracing a path that runs from sky to sand, and from sand back into the ground, it moves back through time, toward us.