A GIFT OF DUST

Traveling plumes of dust demonstrate how interconnected our planet is.

Brockenbrough tells the story of dust as it journeys from a dried-up Saharan lakebed to the Amazon. Over the course of thousands of years, a dead trout dies, decomposes, and fossilizes. Wind churns the fossils up from “the cracked earth the lake has left behind”; the fossils turn into dust “that paints the sky,” then crosses the ocean as its feeds plankton, which in turn nourishes sharks, fish, and whales. By the time the dust plume has encountered hurricanes and sprinkled the Amazon with phosphorus, which is crucial to plants, it’s large enough to see from space—the weight of “almost 262 billion basketballs.” Brockenbrough lays out a thorough, informative story about how a speck of dust connects continents and species, providing nutrition to flora and fauna and allowing the oceans to produce oxygen for us to breathe. Caldecott honoree Martinez-Neal’s art is a showstopper, however. Her mixed-media illustrations on hand-textured paper command attention, from the endpapers mapping the “Route of the Dust” to the ghostly remnants of fossils in a dust storm to a gorgeous bird’s-eye view of the Amazon and the tender hands of a brown-skinned adult and child, who will be the recipients of dust’s good work in the future.

A natural wonder, brought to vivid life.