The Secret Life of Dust

Creative Cremains, for instance, stirs flower seeds and a dash of ash into paper pulp, to make handmade paper cards. The recipients of these twenty-five-dollar missives are expected to cut them into pieces and plant them—bone dust, seeds, and all.

“We’re the only nation in the world where activity is lower in the lower class than in the other classes,” he says.

Superfine carbon dust changes blood makeup in a way that raises the risk of stroke, for instance. Diesel soot also alters the makeup of blood, changing both the number of platelets and the white blood cell count. The exhaust from oil burners increases arrhythmia, or irregular heartbeat. Metal dusts cause biological reactions in the lungs that lead to swelling. Exposing animals to “off the street” polluted air has revealed numerous ways that dust can drag down its victims. Taken as a diverse gang, these mixed dusts alter blood chemistry. They change the heart rate. They change the mixture of defensive chemicals in the lungs.

Hardest hit by dust, Lippmann says, are people over sixty-five and children. Pound for pound, children breathe more air than adults do, so they take in more dust. Their developing bodies are less able to dispense with toxic chemicals in the dust. Epidemiologists have linked extra-dusty air to children’s asthma attacks, and even to sudden infant death syndrome. Dusty air also correlates with a lower birth weight for babies, which in turn presages a more troublesome childhood

United States banned leaded gasoline decades ago, but lead is still stored in roadside soils. It is free to go for a ramble whenever the wind invites it. Mercury and dioxins, arsenic and DDT also circulate tirelessly and rain down continuously. Whether these toxic substances take a sabbatical in the soil when they settle, whether they lurch back into the air, or whether they’re sidetracked into the food chain—that’s the luck of the draw

More recently, Miller has been looking at how dust functions when it’s added to compost. He thinks it may speed the bacteria in their work of breaking down dead plant tissue, and that the bugs may break the dust into optimally tiny bites of plant food

When dark-colored dust falls out of the sky and onto the ice of Lake Bonney, it absorbs sunlight. It melts a little hole in the ice and sinks. The next day it absorbs a little more sunlight and drills a bit deeper into the ice. And so it goes, until the dust reaches a point about halfway down to the entombed lake. There, under six feet of ice, is a layer of scattered dust clumps, the biggest of which are a few inches long.

Consider this the next time you pop the top off a beverage can. Hundreds of thousands or even millions of years ago the aluminum that makes up that container flew, one speck at a time, out of the Sahara and across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean.

Many of the soda cans in the United States are made from Jamaican aluminum ore, or bauxite.

Many of the Caribbean islands, Muhs explains, are made from the fossil skeletons of old coral reefs.