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The Forum: Dust and Ash

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Serageldin Palace, Cairo, 2006 Photograph © by Xenia Nikolskaya

22/06/2013 GMT

Dust and Ash

BBC World Service - The Forum, Dust and Ash

How dust helps to keep the planet cooler and nourishes the Amazon rainforest

How dust helps to keep the planet cooler and nourishes the Amazon rainforest.

In this week’s Forum Bridget Kendall and her guests discuss a substance which is everywhere. We can see it moving around, but we cannot stop its track. It’s in our houses and places of work as well as in the atmosphere. And although we try to avoid it, it can keep the planet a little cooler. We discuss dust and ash. 

Joining Bridget Kendall are: Japanese-American writer Katie Kitamura, whose latest novel was inspired by volcanic ash traveling across boundaries; Xenia Nikolskaya, a Russian photographer who has captured images of deserted palaces and mansions in Egypt that are covered in dust; and Professor Charlie Bristow, a sedimentologist from Birkbeck College at the University of London, who has worked in the dustiest place on earth - the Bodélé basin in the Sahara - and has been examining why dust travels the Atlantic to nourish the Amazon rainforest.

Photo: Serageldin Palace, Cairo 2006 © Xenia Nikolskaya

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