"Wednesday, April 27, 2005 shows a dust storm across the western desert of Iraq on Tuesday April 26, 2005. The storm spawned near the border of Syria and Jordan, leaving a heavy sheet of dust in its wake. (AP Photo/US Army, Sgt Shannon Arledge)"
Update: More at Snopes and BBC.
Gesundheit!
Sandstorm in Iraq! links to some more photos from BBC, and there's much larger images.
That's no sandstorm. That's Rumsfeld's ego.
That's both cool and scary at the same time...
Muad'dib! Muad'dib! Muad'dib!
You just made me spit coke on my monitor.
Brilliant. Now watch out for sand-worms.
Those are quite common in the second summer of the monsoon here in Phoenix, Arizona coming from the east. It is well known that the dust comes as far away as Mongolia and paves destruction and creates microbursts along its path.
The worst and only thing natural phenomena we deal with here.
You can tell this was written at 4:30 am without even looking at the timestamp.
It turns out a friend is working at the base where those pictures were taken. When I saw the pictures, I emailed him since, hey, how big is Iraq anyway? If he's there, I'm sure he saw it, right?
that is both the coolest and most horrifying thing that I have ever seen. It is also an incredibly well captured photo. It is images like these that makes a photographer's ambitions worth it.
Damn, that first picture looks like a model.
I've tried to explain to people for a while how one time I was flying over Arizona or New Mexico or some backwards southwestern state like that, and I look ahead and there's this mile+ high wall of sand and our plane is about to slam into it. So we do and it doesn't hurt the plane any, but a few minutes later the captain gets on the horn and says "you know, we're going to drop you guys off in Las Vegas". Anyway, it looked like in those pictures, except less rolling and more static, and much taller!
So we've got the dune references.
Where are the _His Dark Materials_ references?