Lose the Crust, Inherit the Wind As the West struggles with wildfires this summer, hot, dry weather is also contributing to massive dust storms in Arizona. Known as "haboobs," the storms are characterized by strong winds and a wall of dust that can be thousands of feet high, grounding planes, blowing away barns and knocking out power to major cities like Phoenix. Dust storms are nothing new to Arizona: each year, an average of five people die in dust storms between May and September, when such a storm can blot out the sun and create a hazard on highways. To raise awareness of the risks of driving during dust storms, Arizona's Transportation Department recently invited residents to write haiku on the dangers via Twitter and Facebook. While state agencies grapple with the public safety problem, scientists are studying the root causes of dust storms. Just as poor farming practices, including plowing up the prairie to plant crops, created Dust Bowl conditions in the 1930s in the driest regions of the Great Plains, the erosion of Arizona's "desert crust" is contributing to dust storms today. The trick is getting people to care about a terrain that some people think of as barren or lifeless, and perhaps not as worthy of preserving as, say, a rainforest. "My whole life, I've been trying to get people to see this wasteland as a wonderland," said Jayne Belnap, a research ecologist with the United States Geological Survey who is an expert on desert soil. The desert is not barren but teeming with organisms like algae, mosses and lichens that act as filaments holding a floor of sand and gravel together. When that crust is disturbed by farming, roads, mining, or "hooves, bikes, wheels, boots," Dr. Belnap said, "you have an area that's ready to blow." Every desert has small areas of tall plants like sagebrush that protect soils. In deserts like the Mojave, there are large areas with rock cover. But in general, deserts are vulnerable. Once a desert surface is disturbed, a chain reaction of events is set in motion that can prove damaging. The dust can cover snow on mountains, for example, resulting in faster and earlier snow melt. The soil underneath is then exposed to sunlight, which causes moisture to evaporate into the air rather than run off into streams and rivers. The effect is measurable: for example, reduced runoff from snow melt has caused an annual 5 percent decrease in the amount of water entering the Colorado River, which experts say already faces the risk of significantly drying up. "This is now a really big deal," Dr. Belnap said. Yet the West was not always a dusty place, she said. Starting in the 1850"s, the massive westward migration of people and grazing animals trampling across the fragile terrain led to a gradual erosion of the soil, spawning the modern idea of the dust-choked western landscape with blowing tumbleweed. The organisms that make up the crust are cryptobiotic, meaning that their metabolism shuts down when it's dry. Damaged crypto can only grow back when it's wet. "We can't put the desert back together again like we put Pennsylvania back together after strip mining ended there," Dr. Belnap said. We don't get much rain here. With climate change, she said, the problem is only going to get worse. But the good news is that something can be done, she added. "We need to map vulnerable areas and stay off them, and we can plant areas as well," she said. But we need to make this a priority. Most of the dust problem originates at small-point sources like abandoned croplands outside Phoenix and in northeastern Arizona where decades of coal mining have damaged aquifers and caused dry conditions. Tackling such areas could address a large part of the problem, Dr. Belnap said, but ultimately it will take money and the political will. Her job is simply to provide data on the science to federal agencies like the Department of Interior, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Policy decisions can be thorny for those agencies, she said. "It's going to be very politically loaded," Dr. Belnap said. You go to Joe Rancher and tell him he can't put his cattle there, you're affecting his livelihood. Meanwhile, the dust storms continue to blow through Arizona, prompting safety warnings and, these days. the occasional poem. A haiku entry at the Web site of Arizona's transportation department reads: sand flies, no warning do others see what I see part fear, part beauty