Lachlan Marchant and his colleagues were driving their golf buggies back to their shed when they saw the earth sweeping towards them.
“It reminded us of Uluru, the sheer size and width of this thing,” Marchant said. “It was just rolling at us.”
On Sunday, for the second day in a row, a dust storm swept over one of Australia’s largest underground goldmines in the remote Tanami desert.
The Newmont mine maintenance team had been working since 6.30am and were preparing to take their break when Marchant, a plumber, spotted the orange bloom approaching slowly from the south.
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By about 4pm, the cloud had enveloped the horizon on the Tanami desert, nearly 1,000km south of Darwin.
“To see one the next day coming over the horizon, you’re like, ‘holy crap, this thing is 10 times bigger than what we’ve just seen yesterday, this is insane’,” Marchant said.
“You don’t know when it’s coming at you if it’s going to be dangerous or not.”
The bronze clouds surged skyward as they neared the mine site, breaking through the silver clouds above, before the camp was enveloped in rust-brown mist.
“You just feel the grit in your teeth and your eyes start to hurt because it’s just flying around,” Marchant said.
While visibility inside the storm was fine and wind was low, the thunder and lightning that followed sent the crew inside. When the storm passed an hour later, muddy rain had fallen across the site.
“The carwashes I’m assuming got a running through: everyone needed to definitely wash their white utes,” Marchant said.
Dust storms are a product of weather systems with heavy winds lifting up dry earth and sand and taking them across the landscape, according to soil expert Dr John Grant.
Dry climates such as the Australian outback encourage the storms, with areas of low rainfall seeing the events almost monthly, said Grant, a lecturer at Southern Cross University.
A cold front brought the storm through Tanami as well as a cool change, with Marchant noticing that the area’s 40C daytime maximum temperatures fell below 30C in following days as winds stayed high.
While Marchant and his colleagues stayed safe indoors, the storms carry a direct health risk, triggering higher asthma presentations at hospitals. They also damage the natural environment, stripping the most nutritious parts of local soils.
Droughts make the events more likely, with dry conditions in South Australia producing a storm in May that swept into Victoria and saw particles reach coastal New South Wales.
Australia’s east coast is rarely blanketed by dust, with Sydney and Brisbane residents not subjected to the thick red air since 2009.
Rising potential for drought amid global heating could see dust storms occur more often, raising risks for humans and environment, Grant warned.
“They’re quite an amazing phenomena but, for me, it’s emotive to see that loss of important parts of the soil, [because] you know that what’s left behind after that is going to be poorer,” Grant says.
“We’re going to lose those ecosystems if we continue to lose soils from them – we’ll start to lose species, [so] it’s important to try and maintain and protect the soils within them.”
