George Everett Marsh, Jr.

On April 14, 1935, Black Sunday, the engineer George Marsh shot a photograph of a dust storm, a “black blizzard”, moving at 60mph, looming a mile high over the Panhandle town of Stratford, Texas.

Drought, overgrazing, aggressive cultivation, and tenant farming (via the lack of a long-term incentive to invest in soil conservation) helped spawn the storm, which affected Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, and reputedly displaced roughly 300 million tons of topsoil.

Marsh took the photo during his triangulation of elevations and geographic coordinates for the U.S. Coastal and Geodetic Survey. On Marsh’s death in 1955, his family gave the photo, with other artifacts, to the Survey. It was not until 1997 that it was digitized and posted to the Internet. In the years since, it has appeared in over 24 books, 39 countries, and 25 languages, and has become an iconic view of the Dust Bowl.