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Atmosphere 1010
Interstellar opens its scenes with a brief slow pan shot of a toy spaceship covered in dust
as the voice of an elderly woman starts to describe what it was like living back in the day. A few
elderly people are interviewed as it seems some time after the disaster that is explained in the
movie. They describe the living conditions of the day, the fields and fields of corn, the blight and
its acts of destruction, and the dust. One man tells how when they set the table for dinner they
would set the cups and plates upside down to keep them clean from the dust.
The world of Interstellar has been ravaged by “the blight”, a crop eating machine, the
root cause of the Dust Bowl like conditions that are seen in the movie. This blight is not well
and various other agriculture has been wiped out. The problem here is that corn is short rooted
plant and because that is mostly all that is left the soil is very loose. There isn’t any deep roots
sunk into the soil to hold down the dirt and so when the winds pick up like they often do, it picks
up the loose dirt on top and blows it every witch way. The conditions in the movie are very
similar to what actually happened in the United States in the 1930’s with the Dust Bowl with
The dust storms are a constant threat to the remaining inhabitants of the earth. Animals
are suffocated, dust gets in electronics, and dust storms do substantial damage to all in its path.
baseball game and the way home from it and how they
escape and deal with them. Cooper and his kids have to
and how it sets up having an environment where dust storms are present. As the “World
Meteorological Center” says, “They are usually caused by thunderstorms – or strong pressure
gradients associated with cyclones – which increase wind speed over a wide area. These strong
winds lift large amounts of sand and dust from bare, dry soils into the atmosphere, transporting
them hundreds to thousands of kilometres away.” In the Interstellar world there isn't any special
phenomenon that causes the dust storms explicitly, it is very similar to real life that happen from
a thunderstorm and unstable air lifting up the dust that's on the ground. This works a little too
well in Interstellar because of the excess of dust in the environment and hence the presence of
Miller , Ron, and Ina Tegan. “Desert Dust, Dust Storms and Climate.” NASA, NASA, Apr. 1997,
www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/miller_01/.
Nolan, Christopher, director. Interstellar. Interstellar, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros Pictures,
24 Oct. 2014.
public.wmo.int/en/our-mandate/focus-areas/environment/sand-and-dust-storm.
www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/legacy/.
“This Massive Dust Storm Was Shot from a Fleeing News Helicopter.” PetaPixel, 6 Aug. 2018,
petapixel.com/2018/08/04/this-massive-dust-storm-was-shot-from-a-fleeing-news-helicopter/.