My wife met a woman from Greece who told her that sand blows from Africa to Greece and during the rainy season it’s a big mess because the sandy mud is all over the place.
From Africa? Really?
Don’t know about Greece, but sometimes sand blows from Africa to Ireland, and forms a reddish deposit on cars and other surfaces. I also just watched the first episode of “Planet Earth” on BBC where they said that sand from African sandstorms blows “half-way around the world” to fertilise the Amazon basin.
It doesn’t sound all that hard to believe. It’s not particularly far from North Africa to Greece.
Under the right conditions, it can also blow all the way across the Atlantic into the West Indies and Florida, making for some nice sunsets.
We occasionally get this arriving in the south of England too. The sand tends to be very fine - more like a powder really.
It happens all the time. According to this website: ncmr.gr , we are going to get dusted again tomorrow 
Choose Φορτίο σκόνης and Animation and click the button Εμφάνιση. In case you cannot see the animation, I saved it here: http://img96.imageshack.us/my.php?image=0005we.gif
Big Sahara sandstorms can cause haze all the way here in Texas, too.
Begorrah. That would explain Enya’s song “Afer Ventus.”
Afer Ventus. Zephyrus.
Volturnus. Africus.
I guess that’s my problem. I’m thinking of your standard beach sand. Americans, does sand from the Southwest blow to places like Oklahoma, Arkansas, or Missouri?
I don’t know, but forest fires in Mexico once got some ash on us here in South Carolina, and made beautiful sunsets.
Not that I have ever heard of.
I remember a few years ago when sand got blown all the way over to the north of England and fell mixed with the rain. All the cars were covered in a reddy-brown dust once the water evaporated. I think the weather reporters said that there had been a few large sandstorms in the Sahara, and that was the cause.
This happens in Italy too. I was in Pompeii a few years ago and it was incredibly dirty because of this. All the cars were covered in dust and the sky was actually yellow. You can see the effect in one of my photos.
In geology, sand denotes a grain size from .0625 to 2 mm.
It’s pretty hard to move sand. Even in a strong wind, it doesn’t get far off the ground, and does most of it’s moving by bouncing along the ground (saltation).
Very fine grained particles of dust, ash, etc., though, can be carried for hundreds or thousands of miles, to the point of encircling the earth if they get picked up by the winds aloft. These particles are of silt or clay size.
There was a satellite picture of Earth in some magazine (Scientific American most likely, but there’s an outside chance it was Popular Science or some such like that) a few months ago that showed Saharan sand crossing the Atlantic. It was quite striking. The article that went along with the illustration led one to believe that this was not an uncommon occurance.
Check it out.
That’s a cool picture sunacres.
So if I understand correctly, it’s not really sand, it’s better defined as a dust. But given that it’s coming from the Sahara, the use of the term sand seems more, uh…intuitive.
Thanks for the replies everyone! 
What is the role of such long distance dust? I’ve heard that atmospheric dust acts as nucleation sites for raindrops and snowflakes-supposedly a dearth of such dust particles can leade to droughts. In particular, the rainfall in the Amazon basin is highly dependent upon african dust. Anybody know more about this.
It looks like the sandstorm in The Mummy!