At a Glance

A global dust storm is not likely on Earth due to oceans and increased gravity. Dust storms can travel for hundreds to thousands of miles on Earth. The wind in haboobs is much stronger than on Mars.

A dust storm is currently encircling Mars. The current global haboob on Mars is the biggest in over a decade and the first one to be monitored by rovers on the red planet.

This set of images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows a fierce dust storm is kicking up on Mars, with rovers on the surface indicated as icons.

(NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

Could a storm like this one occur in the United States or elsewhere on Earth?

There are twomajor differences between our planet and our nearest neighbor that make a global dust storm less likely here at home: gravity and oceans.

On Mars, some dust storms and then some, while Earthly storms only reach a depth of up to 8,000 feet. This is because our atmosphere is more dense and thinner than on Mars because of increased gravitational pull on the atmosphere.

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The winds in Martian dust storms are in the rough ballpark of those on Earth or slightly less – , but that is overstating their impact. With less atmosphere to blow around, these winds also have less force and would hit somebody on Mars with less intensity.

The strongest dust storms on Earth can blow at up to 80 mph and with substantially more force.

The other thing that Earth has that Mars does not is large bodies of water. The added humidity and the water's surface can remove dust from the lower levels of the atmosphere. This makes it more difficult for a strong dust storm to make it from one continent to the next especially if there is a large ocean in between the two.

The duststorm on Mars isn't rare on that planet, and, in fact, they occur once every six to eight years at this size, .

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Dust storms also occur with high frequency on Earth, but generally at a much smaller scale. Here are a few examples:

A few common sources of dust storms are the summer monsoon in the southwestern United States and tropical waves from the Saharan Desert in Africa.

Dust storms are common in the Southwest where strong winds and a flood of moisture kicks up sand and dust each spring.

A large dust storm, or haboob, sweeps across downtown Phoenix, Saturday afternoon, July 21, 2012. Dust storms are common across Arizona during the summer, and walls of dust more than a thousand feet high can blanket an area in a matter of seconds, sometimes reducing visibility to zero.

(AP Photo/Mark Evans)

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In fact, there are three kinds of dust storms that impact the Southwest, according to Ken Waters, Warning Coordination Meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Phoenix, Arizona.

Monsoonal haboobs: Clouds of dust produced by thunderstorms and theirwinds during the summer months Synoptic wind storms: Caused by strong winds located between areas ofhigh and low pressure or behind a frontal passage. Channel dust events: A very local ribbon of dust that can be as small as 100 feet wide and last as long as 2 hours.

The biggest dust storms in the Southwest can get up to 200 miles long and 8,000 feet high, according to Waters. They can travel more than 200 miles from their source, but they usually weaken with distance.

Small-scaledust events can also be created by the mismanagement of land including farming and crops, says Waters. Theseplots of land can dry up quicker than vegetated land, and can become dust without water treatment. When a burst of wind comes along, that dust can blow across local roads causing accidents due to lowered visibility.

A bigger scale example of this was the 1930's Dust Bowl that affected much of the Plains. Bad farming practices and the movement of farmers away from their farms led to massive dust clouds for years. The worst ones were in the Plains and east to the Atlantic where they impacted New York City.

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The second major example of dust in the United States is the transport of Saharan dust from Africa. This dust is known to change the land and atmosphere in Europe, Bermuda, the southeastern United States and in the Amazon.

While in most cases, this dust does not come in the form of a wall of sand like we see in the Southwest, it does darken skies along the Gulf Coast on several occasions each year. On rare occasions, you can even get a layer of fine dust in Florida, the Caribbean and in Bermuda.

These bursts of dust, often called Saharan Air Layer (SAL) outbreaks, can expand for thousands of miles, but usually carry more dry air than dust due to its travels over the ocean and through the moist tropics.

Strong storm system often move dust from the Arabian peninsula to elsewhere in western Asia, Africa and eastern Europe, too.