At a Glance

Satellite imagery captured a sizable dust plume being kicked up from Greenland, an event that's rarely observed.These type of high-latitude dust events have been sporadically recorded for more than a century.Scientists hope these events will soon be included in atmospheric and climate models.

As a massive island mainly covered in ice, Greenland may be one of the last places you associate with dust taking to its skies. However, , according to NASA Earth Observatory.

A collection of images taken by Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 on Sept. 21, 23, 29 and 30 show the process of a floodplain drying out into a drier, gray color (the first two images in the animation shown above) before northwesterly winds strong enough to kick up sizable dust plume into the air came sweeping through (the third image in the animation).

The dust shown is known as glacial flour, which is a , according to the National Snow & Ice Data Center.

Images captured Sept. 21, 23, 29 and 30 show as a Greenland floodplain dries out and turns into a gray color (the first two images of this animation) and a sizable dust plume is kicked into the air (the last image in this animation).

(NASA Earth Observatory)

The glacial flour was likely produced by several glaciers further up the valley and then carried downstream by meltwaters, where it came to rest in the floodplain. The floodplain then dried out after water levels dropped in autumn.

While the dust events that stem from Greenland aren't nearly as drastic as those of that blanket skies of the Sahara Desert for days, Greenland's winds are capable of blowing up plumes of sediment from fried-out lakes, river valleys and outwash plains that occur in front of melting glaciers.

The plume that was captured over satellite originated from a floodplain that sat some 80 miles northwest of Ittoqqortoomiit, a village that sits at a latitude of 73 degrees north. At that latitude, the village is north of the northern coast of Alaska and several hundred miles above the Arctic Circle.

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These types of high-latitude dust events likethe one recently seen in Greenland have been sporadically reported in publications and logs for more than a century, but the last ten years have seen scientists attempt to study them systematically. A recent study in American Geophysical Union even before this one seen in late September.

“This is by far the biggest event detected and reported by satellites that I know about,” said Santiago Gassó, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

“We have seen a few examples of small dust events before this one, but they are quite difficult to spot with satellites because of cloud cover,” said Joanna Bullard, Professor of Physical Geography at Loughborough University. “When dust events do happen, field data from Iceland and West Greenland indicate that they rarely last longer than two days.”

While these types of high-latitude dust events aren't typically included in atmospheric and climate models because so little is known about them, Gassó hopes that they'll soon be included due to their effects on air quality, snow reflectivity and marine biology.