Sahara

In the couple of decades I've watched environmentalists go to ever-greater lengths to get out their messages, I've seen few more wacky stunts than the one planned by two guys from Canada: Running the length of the world's oldest and deepest lake, Lake Baikal in Siberia, in the wintertime. While pulling along 100 pounds of supplies behind them. And live-blogging the whole thing, of course. (What?!? No Twitter!?!)

Ray Zahab and Kevin Vallely -- shall we just call them "the wackos" from now on? -- plan to  set off on March 1, which means the ice will still be plenty hard on Baikal. (Fun fact: Less than a decade ago, Zahab was a pack-a-day cigarette smoker and couch potato!)

Their cause: to highlight the value and scarcity of fresh water. Nowhere else in the world does a freshwater lake hold as many gallons as does Baikal. It has more of the wet stuff than all of America's Great Lakes combined.

You may have heard of these wackos before.

It's one of those increasingly frequent stories demonstrating that ecologically, the whole globe is connected -- and why that's not always a good thing:

Pesticides, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and polychlorinated biphenyls are among the contaminants hitching an airborne ride to the United States and other parts of the Western Hemisphere on dust storms blowing out of West Africa. That's according to new research presented at the just-completed annual meeting of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.

[caption id="attachment_6259" align="alignleft" width="197" caption="This image from Aug. 5, 2005 shows African dust spreading west, north and south as the green and yellow. Courtesy Dr. Douglas Westphal, Navy Research Lab, Monterey, CA"][/caption]

The findings are worrisome because some of the chemicals carried on the trade winds originating in Africa are persistent in the environment, they bioaccumulate, and they are known to be toxic at low concentrations, said U.S. Geological Survey researcher Ginger Garrison, who presented the findings at the SETAC conference in New Orleans.

It's been known for some time now that dust storms blowing off North Africa make their way across the Atlantic and deposit fine particles of dust. I covered that in my Florida days, the Sunshine State being the U.S. region getting the highest concentrations of the superfine dust.

The dust travels as far west as the Rockies and as far north as New England, and tongues of it have reached out across Central America into the Pacific.