Foreign Affairs

Massive Storm In Sahara Desert Covers Countries Thousands Of Miles Away With Dust

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A dust storm traveling from the Sahara desert to countries all over Europe is making it hard to breath in parts of Spain on Wednesday, the Associated Press reported.

Other locations across France, Portugal and more have been coated in a film of dirt, the AP reported. In the Swiss Alps, even, snow was covered in an orange coat of tiny particles that made their way across the Mediterranean Sea, dispersing all over Europe.

The dust brought on “degraded air quality across large parts of Spain, Portugal and France,” according to the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, the AP reported.

“This is an intense event, but this type of event typically occurs once or twice a year, normally in February or March, when a low-pressure system over Algeria and Tunisia gathers up dust and carries it north to Europe,” Carlos Pérez García, a researcher studying atmospheric dust at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, told the AP. “Dust can reach the U.K., or even Iceland, as it did last year.”