"Neil Shook was relaxing at home in Woodworth, N.D., on a Saturday afternoon just over a week ago.

'My wife was outside and she yelled at me to come outside and take a look at this,' he recalls.

A massive brown cloud covered the horizon to the west. It was a dust storm — although Shook, who's a scientist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, doesn't like to call it dust. 'I like to refer to it as soil, because that's basically what it is,' he says. 'We saw this huge soil cloud moving from west to east across the landscape.'"

Dan Charles reports for NPR June 7, 2017. [2]