As you swing round to the north-west of the existing Barajas complex, the new terminal appears as a vigorous wiggle in the bleached altiplano landscape, like a back-of-the-envelope sketch made flesh.

Modem life in the country's capital melts away to scenes of native Aymarans guiding ox-drawn plows across small plots of unyielding altiplano soil.

Ginoux and his colleagues have identified 10 main sources of global dust events including the Sahara Desert, the Sahel region, the Namibian desert lands of southwestern Africa, the Indus Valley in India, the Taklimakan Desert north of the Himalaya, the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, the Lake Eyre basin in Australia, the Salton Sea in southeastern California, the Altiplano stretching between Bolivia and Peru, and the Patagonian region of the Andes Mountains.