Sand Blasted

I'll never complain about snow or rain again. These photos are best viewed at full size, click them to enlarge.

From The Daily Mail (UK)...

Like a scene from a Hollywood disaster movie, a towering cloud of sand dwarfs the rows of uniform houses as it descends on a small village in central China. Residents hid inside their homes with their windows and doors locked shut as the dust storm swept through the region advancing 70ft a minute.

More than a quarter of China - around one million square miles - is covered in sand with the Gobi covering northern parts of the country. The bad news for the government is that the desert is growing despite their best efforts to contain it. The process of desertification has been worsened by over-grazing, deforestation, urban sprawl and an increasingly erratic climate. The Chinese Academy of Sciences estimates that the number of sandstorms has jumped six-fold in the past 50 years to two dozen a year.

Check out this post for a video of a similar storm in Australia.