File:Dust off West Africa (MODIS 2018-10-30).jpg

English: Dust poured off the southern Sahara Desert and over the Atlantic Ocean in late October, 2018. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired a true-color image of the massive dust storm on October 25, 2018. A large plume of tan dust, thick enough to obscure the view of the ocean below, hangs over the North Atlantic Ocean west of the green Sahel region, carried there after arcing from the southwestern Sahara across Senegal and The Gambia. A finer layer of dust covers the entire scene from Mauritania southwards to Guinea, nearly 1,000 km (600 mi). Scientists estimate that winds and storms pick up roughly 180 million tons of dust from the Sahara Desert and deposit it in the Atlantic Ocean and, at times, carry it across the Atlantic to the Americas.