Following World War I, wheat farming in the fertile loess soil of the Interior Plains swelled. The expansion of farmland eliminated many prairies containing soil-stabilizing grasses. While droughts in the region were common, during the following drought, aeolian soil erosion was exacerbated by the reduced soil-holding prairie grasses. Dust storms eroded hundreds of millions of tons of topsoil, causing dust storms for months in the historical region known as the Dust Bowl. On May 12, 1934 alone, an estimated 200 million tons of wind-eroded topsoil were transported to the Atlantic ocean.