\u201eWhy the hell do you go to Cape Verde to collect Saharan dust??\u201c was the question that Mirja was confronted with several times by the locals at Cape Verde in October. Of course it would be much easier to collect the sand straight from the Sahara desert in one day instead of mounting boxes on a construction ruin at Cape Verde that wait to be filled during the expected dust events in the next few months\u2026<\/p>\n
However, the sandy dust, coming to Cape Verde with the winds all the way from the Sahara several times a year, undergoes chemical modifications during transport and thus has a different composition compared to the sand lying on the desert ground of Sahara. In the end, after successful collection the boxes with sand will be transported to Canary Islands and used for Mesocosm experiments in 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\t