Tens of hundreds of Burning Man attendees in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert needed to trudge by rain and dirt final Friday and into final weekend after an uncommon bout of rain within the area.
The Black Rock Playa, the place the festivities are held annually, is a flat expanse that hosted a prehistoric lake over 15,000 years ago. The equal of about three months value of rain dropped over the desert, CBS Information reported. On September 1, as much as 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) of rain fell in that space. This area experiences about 6 inches (15.2 cm) of rain every yr. And since it’s flat, water pooled within the space, creating thick mud that was exhausting to maneuver round in.
Attendees posted videos online displaying what the world seemed like earlier than and after the rain. Newly launched satellite photos present how the water pooled within the desert, creating the troublesome circumstances that made headlines final weekend. Two pictures from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite tv for pc present the area earlier than and after the rains got here by. The primary picture, proven beneath, reveals the sandy desert on August 26.
The second picture reveals the pooled rain water on September 4. The after picture highlights the saturated floor, rainwater, and lakes with shades of blue.
One other satellite tv for pc picture reveals how darkish the bottom had grow to be after the rainfall. “Darkish areas are seemingly mud, or the place the floor is saturated with water. The picture was acquired with the Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI-2) on Landsat 9,” according to NASA Earth Observatory.
Individuals have taken to social media to debate potential hyperlinks between local weather change and the bizarre rainfall within the desert throughout the occasion. Local weather scientist Daniel Swain defined in a thread on X, previously Twitter, that there’s a local weather angle, however that an occasion being washed out was excessive on the climate-associated considerations. “Is it believable? Sure, most likely—the heaviest downpours will improve nearly in every single place in a warming local weather,” he tweeted last weekend.
And although most of tens of hundreds of attendees had been alright by the bizarre climate, one attendee did die throughout the storm final week. 32-year-old Leon Reece was discovered unresponsive on Friday night when the desert was experiencing the heavy rainfall, The Each day Beast reported. Authorities hesitated to attach his demise to the climate, however later mentioned that the rain did in actual fact delay efforts to ship for assist.
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