Saharan Dust Cloud Carrying Trace Radioactivity Reaches Europe

A large plume of dust "showing very high values of aerosol optical depth (AOD) and dust concentrations" arrived in Belgium on Wednesday, March 16, reports L’Avenir.net. The origin of this dust is a powerful hot wind from Morocco. It has degraded the air quality of several European countries, including France, Spain and Portugal, and offered landscapes and shots with orange hues in Belgium. It carries a little radioactivity.

"Like all the soils of the northern hemisphere, those of the Sahara are marked by the fallout from all the atmospheric nuclear tests carried out in the 1960s," by the USSR, the United States, France or China, says the French Institute for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN). As a result, the dust from the Sahara contains cesium 137 (Cs-137), a radioactive element. "The concentration of Cs-137 present in the fine particles of Saharan sands was in February 2021 extremely low in the atmosphere and at ground level," explains Jean-Christophe Gariel, Deputy Director General in charge of the Health-Environment division at the IRSN, in Le Parisien.