00:00If there was a contest for being a bad town, Singapore would be the winner.
00:05And no, I'm not talking about Singapore in Asia.
00:08I'm talking about a small town called Singapore in Michigan, United States,
00:13that buried itself because of one simple mistake.
00:17This tiny, unlucky settlement was founded in 1837 by O'Shea Wilder.
00:23He had a dream to build a town and did just that.
00:26But he definitely didn't know how the city would end.
00:31After the first year, it struggled economically.
00:34But soon after, it found its path in lumber work.
00:36At its finest, it had a population of 300 people.
00:41In 1842, the city experienced a pretty hard winter.
00:46Its inhabitants were left with no food and no way of surviving.
00:50But by some miracle, they found a ship that had recently sunk near the town's coasts.
00:54Luckily, the ship was packed to the brim with all kinds of food.
00:59They also had one of the best lighthouses, but not for long because it fell down and got destroyed in a few years.
01:05People didn't restore it, saying that they didn't need one despite being a hotspot for ships.
01:10That's nice of them.
01:12Then a couple of years later, everything started going downhill.
01:16And half of the Midwest burned in a big fire.
01:19Surrounding towns turned into ashes, but this place remained intact.
01:25Trees were burned in the surrounding towns, but Singapore had an untouched forest ready to be harvested.
01:31They began cutting trees, particularly the white pine tree.
01:35This, of course, busted the town's economy.
01:38As we all know, cutting a lot of trees is pretty bad.
01:41But nobody could predict what would happen next, unless they were experts in dunes.
01:48The location of Singapore was unique.
01:51On the left side, they had a lovely beach by Lake Michigan.
01:55In front of them, there was a river, and everything else was a forest.
01:58But the most critical part of the town was the forest near the beach, which was sitting on top of sand dunes.
02:05I don't know if you know this, but trees don't usually grow in sand, but I guess this place was special.
02:10So, these dunes weren't like those typical ones in the Sahara or any other desert.
02:15Such dunes can only be found near the ocean or, in this rare case, on the coast of Lake Michigan.
02:20This formation can be more than 4,000 years old and as tall as 196 feet.
02:27Their formation is a pretty simple process.
02:30The river that enters the lake carries tons of sand.
02:33Then, the sand is distributed all over the beach by waves.
02:37Later, it dries out and is blown by the wind, but not far.
02:41It's caught by all kinds of vegetation.
02:44And voila, you have a sand dune!
02:46This process has been heavily studied by scientists, and it's been concluded that plants play an essential role here.
02:52They stabilize the dunes by preventing the sand from being blown out, and the roots help the sand not to fall apart.
02:59Plus, they hold water, and if you've ever made a sandcastle, you know wet sand doesn't fall apart.
03:06If only the Singaporeans had known this before starting their tree-cutting business!
03:11Plants develop in a couple of stages.
03:16The first stage is called pioneers.
03:18Some plants begin the dune-building process, but over time, they perish and become food for the next generation of plants, which is called scrub.
03:28In this category, tiny trees and vines are extremely vulnerable, but important for what comes next.
03:34If everything goes right, a rare thing in sandy areas will grow.
03:39A forest!
03:39This stage of plants is so unusual in such regions that it can only be seen in the U.S. on the Atlantic coast or near Lake Michigan.
03:49Forests like the one in Singapore are one in a million because they mostly consist of white pine trees.
03:55That's one of the best woods for lumber.
03:58Now let me tell you a little secret.
04:00Those pines were the only thing keeping the sand dunes in place.
04:03Well, after they'd cut down all the trees on the dunes, the Singaporeans realized they had made a massive mistake.
04:11After not so much time, the sand got dry.
04:14And guess what?
04:15The wind started carrying it right into the town.
04:18In a panic, they somehow moved their houses onto log boats, took them downriver, and unloaded them in the next town, Saugatang.
04:25Some of the houses are still in use now.
04:29Some people were either stubborn or couldn't load their giant houses on logs, and they stayed in the town.
04:35A family lived in a three-story house, and as the wind blew, the house was slowly getting covered with sand.
04:42They moved upstairs as the floors beneath them became unavailable.
04:46Eventually, they ran out of floors.
04:49Instead of Santa Claus coming down their chimney, they got a pile of sand.
04:53And when that happened, they finally decided to move out of Singapore.
04:58In 1894, the city was officially declared a ghost town.
05:02This is not an isolated case.
05:04Many houses are getting buried now.
05:07People are paying tons of money to remove sand from their homes, and most cases occur around Lake Michigan.
05:13There are also a few in Africa.
05:16The Sahara dunes can move and cover the whole of Europe.
05:19You might be wondering what's going on in Singapore today.
05:23Basically, it's a big pile of sand with a sign that says there is a whole town underneath.
05:28The sand preserves around 37 houses.
05:31Maybe one day, archaeologists will find the town and dig it out, restoring it once again in its final glory.
05:39But people who live there said that it was not worth the effort.
05:42Many building projects have been proposed there.
05:44But historians believe the town is important from a historical perspective, and are against building anything there.
05:51Whatever they do, let's hope they won't cut the trees down again.
05:54We can all agree that what happened in Singapore is terrible for people.
06:01But, unfortunately, it's not the only occurrence of its kind in the U.S.
06:06This time, trees and dunes had nothing to do with it.
06:09The next phenomenon, called the Dust Bowl, covered a large area, simultaneously affecting a few states.
06:16Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico.
06:21The first people who saw the land around these states weren't too happy about it, and said it wasn't good for farming because it was too dry.
06:28They even called it the Great American Desert, since there wasn't any water or trees over there.
06:33But, some people took it as a challenge, and stayed there.
06:37They believed it would eventually rain, and the land would magically become fertile.
06:42It happened in the 1900s, and many new machines helping farmers with their work were being developed.
06:48Unfortunately, they overworked the land in the next 30 years, making it even drier.
06:53And yeah, the rain they had been hoping for never arrived.
06:57Instead, a big drought occurred.
06:59It lasted for 10 years, which further worsened the situation.
07:04More than 1 million acres were affected by this colossal Dust Bowl.
07:09The drought worsened yearly, and eventually, the topsoil turned into dust, blown around by the wind, covering houses everywhere.
07:18The dust even reached Washington, D.C.
07:21But not all hope was lost, since people started trying to revive the land.
07:25The Civilian Conservation Corporation began planting around 200 million trees from Texas to Canada.
07:33To prevent the soil from being blown out, farmers began implementing new techniques, like crop rotation, that helped retain water.
07:41Authorities even started paying farmers to start working on the land to improve the condition further.
07:47All this hard work started paying off, and by the 1930s, the dust blowing was reduced by as much as 65%.
07:55But since 75% of the topsoil has already been displaced, it took another 8 to 10 years for the region to fully recover.
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