Eventually, where does all the dust in the world go?

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Does it just get re-circulated? You clean your place and make your neighbour’s place dirty, and vice versa?

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20 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

It eventually settles on a surface. It tends to stick to other dust, aggregating into dirt and grime. Rain speeds the process substantially. Dust is much more persistent in deserts. Some dust goes into the waterways, some on the ground. It settles on lake bottoms and vegetation and, over eons, becomes sedimentary rock.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It gets absorbed into the environment one way or another.

Dust lands in sea; either gets eaten or turns to sediment.

Dust on land: hits the ground and stays dust, until it accumulates and becomes dirt (or dirt almost immediately on damp soil, or mud/sediment on wet soil, which would then just be dirt upon drying)

Dust in the air does a bit of everything. Gets breathed in where it gets added to regular waste processing, or eaten in the case of very small creatures depending on what the dust is made up of. Lands on things and see above.

Its all a big circle.

…..of dust.

Anonymous 0 Comments

More broadly speaking, dust is a type of [sediment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sediment). It gets transported by wind and water. Some of it accumulate in places (esp. bottom of lakes and oceans) and may eventually turn into sedimentary rock. Some of it circulates.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Others already gave you good explanations but as to your question specifically, in most indoor human environment the dust is collected using vacuum cleaner, and it ends up in waste processing plants. Then 99% of dust are burned (because it’s virtually impossible to sort them out for recycling) and become carbon-dioxide (for combustible) or end up buried (incombustible).

Anonymous 0 Comments

Eventually everything in the world will go into the Sun when it expands beyond Earth’s orbit in a few billion years.

Anonymous 0 Comments

So, it goes up into the air. Then it drifts for hundreds of miles. Eventually working it’s way to central California, where it lands on my freshly cleaned car.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There’s a really big vacuum cleaner above the clouds. It hides so it can’t be detected. That’s it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

A lot of it ends up at my place. Then it ends up in my vacuum cleaner then I suppose the landfill. If we think about it, everything and everyone is somewhere on the continuum of turning into dust. But, since the waters comprise 71% of the Earth’s surface, then probability-wise, about 71% of dust falls in the waters and 29% falls somewhere else.

Anonymous 0 Comments

My dude look up this years Saharan air layer/ Saharan dust plume. All through June many islands were in a heavy haze. It hits the southern United states sometimes and mostly affects the Caribbean islands.

Seems like it depends on humidity, rainfall and air currents.

Not an expert at all just seen it happen.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Everything is dust in some form or another. It settles to the surface and sits on the dirt or the ocean. Some of it will mineralize or burn up etc