About 50 percent of aerosols in North America come from overseas, primarily dust and pollution from trans-Pacific transport, and also a little but of dust from trans-Atlantic transport from Africa
What connects Earth's largest, hottest desert to its largest tropical rain forest? For the first time, a NASA satellite has quantified in three dimensions how much Saharan dust makes the trans-Atlantic journey. Scientists have not only measured the volume of the dust, they have also calculated how much phosphorus—remnant in Saharan sands from part of the desert's past as a lake bed—gets carried across the ocean from one of the planet's most desolate places to one of its most fertile. (1)
