Tremor & Tide

Series B · The Day It Happened · Ep. 04 · 15:41 · 25 Nov 2026

What Caused the Dust Bowl's Worst Storm? Black Sunday 1935

Thumbnail · AI reconstruction

Premieres WED 25 NOV · 10:00 CDMX

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Chapters

  1. 0:00 A wall of dust over Dodge City
  2. 0:57 Black Sunday, 1935, hour by hour
  3. 2:52 The trigger: a polar cold front
  4. 4:13 The load, part one: the ground
  5. 5:39 The load, part two: the drought
  6. 6:57 Why the black blizzards rose so high
  7. 8:22 How the Dust Bowl got its name
  8. 10:06 Was it really the worst storm?
  9. 12:10 How the Dust Bowl changed American farms
  10. 13:52 Could the Dust Bowl happen again?

Sources & credits

Sources

  1. 01
    National Weather Service Dodge City, Black Sunday 1935
  2. 02
  3. 03
  4. 04
  5. 05
  6. 06
  7. 07
  8. 08
  9. 09
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14

Footage and images

NOAA / National Weather Service (Spearman, Texas, 14 April 1935). U.S. National Archives / FDR Presidential Library (Beaver, Oklahoma, 14 April 1935; South Dakota, 1934). Soil Conservation Service / National Archives. NOAA Photo Library (George E. Marsh Album; Weather Service collection). Arthur Rothstein, FSA / Library of Congress. Dorothea Lange, FSA / New York Public Library. USDA NRCS South Dakota (Hugh Hammond Bennett). U.S. Weather Bureau: Daily Weather Map, 14 April 1935 (NOAA Central Library) and Monthly Weather Review, June 1936. Public Health Reports, 1935. Soil Conservation Act, U.S. Government Publishing Office. NASA Earth Observatory (Landsat 7). Picture only from "The Plow That Broke the Plains", U.S. Resettlement Administration, 1936. Maps: Natural Earth.

Some scenes are AI reconstructions or AI illustrations and are labelled on screen. Diagrams are redrawn and simplified. Original music.

Thumbnail: AI reconstruction. Made for Tremor & Tide (GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst and Nexlev Thumbnail Lab), using a 1935 Spearman, Texas archive photograph as reference.

AI & archive disclosure

This episode mixes real archive (always labeled) with AI reconstructions and simulations (always labeled). No AI image is presented as a photograph of a real event.

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