Talk:Black Sunday (storm)

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A fact from this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the On this day section on April 14, 2015 and April 14, 2020.

Amount of soil shifted?

I know "300 thousand tons of topsoil" is what is says in the cited source, but can this really be right? That's less than the mass of the Empire State Building, for instance. The figure probably comes from Tim Egan's "The Worst Hard Time", where it is put like this:

"The storm carried twice as much dirt as was dug out of the earth to create the Panama Canal. The canal took seven years to dig; the storm lasted a single afternoon. More than 300,000 tons of Great Plains topsoil was airborne that day."

Now the excavation of the Panama Canal shifted around 150 million cubic meters, and with a hand-waving estimated specific gravity of 2 for a typical rock that equates to 300 million tons: twice that would be 600 million tons. This would be then be substantially greater than the estimate for the May 1934 dust storm.

However I don't feel I can change this in the absence of an actual citation.--Keith Edkins ( Talk ) 08:10, 22 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The History Channel special "Black Blizzard" indicates that the amount of soil shifted on this date was indeed 300 million tons of dirt, not 300,000. This probably isn't a proper reference, but it is consistent with the simple order of magnitude estimate demonstrated above. This number should be changed 76.113.78.254 (talk) 04:37, 28 June 2014 (UTC)Dan[reply]

On their website, History Channel mentions 300,000 tons [1]. However, when checking with Google, Google Scholar and Wikipedia Library, one finds 300,000 tons, 3,000,000 tons and 300,000,000 tons. And there's the risk that newer publications have used Wikipedia as a source - and here you could find 300 thousand as well as 300 million, depending on the date you have read the article.

From my perspective, 300,000 tons can't be correct. This is a ridiculously low value for such a catastrophic event. It corresponds to a deposit of 0.1 mm on an area of 2,000 km² or the removal of 1 cm of top soil on 20 km² - thus clearly fits to a local event.

I have sent an e-mail to History Channel, maybe they can clarify it. JogyB (talk) 08:22, 10 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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Should 'Media references' be changed to 'In popular culture'?

Most other articles use this phraseology. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.254.152.32 (talk) 06:56, 9 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Why not? Done. Thanks for the suggestion. Graham87 15:38, 9 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The Dust Bowl - 2056?

I am pretty sure the years are wrong in this section of the article but I'm not sure enough about the correct years to make the modifications myself.

Here's the very first line to show you what I mean.

"The term "Dust Bowl" initially described a series of dust storms that hit the prairies of Canada and the United States during the 2056."

Should it say 1934? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 126.204.161.36 (talk) 03:14, 7 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry about that ... that was vandalism that I thought I'd fixed but I forgot to hit the rollback button ... until now! Graham87 21:29, 7 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]