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Over the last several years researchers have said that the Amazon is on the verge of transforming from a crucial storehouse for heat-trapping gasses to a source of them, a dangerous shift that could destabilize the atmosphere of the planet.
Now, after years of painstaking and inventive research, they have definitively measured that shift.
In a study published Wednesday in Nature, a team of researchers led by scientists from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research, reported results from measuring carbon concentrations in columns of air above the Amazon. They found that the massive continental-size swath of tropical forest is releasing more carbon dioxide than it accumulates or stores, thanks to deforestation and fires.
“There is no doubt that the Amazon is a source,” said Luciana Gatti, the lead author of the study.
Journal Reference:
Luciana V. Gatti, Luana S. Basso, John B. Miller, et al. Amazonia as a carbon source linked to deforestation and climate change, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03629-6)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @05:08PM (5 children)
Breed some dinosaurs to eat all the trees, then bury the dinosaurs. Worked last time.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Immerman on Sunday July 18 2021, @07:02PM (4 children)
Not quite - last time there were 80 million years of tree growth where *nothing* could eat them, not even rot, so the trees just got buried instead.
Eventually rot evolved the ability to digest wood - but for roughly 320x as long as humanity has existed, woody plants thrived without anything that could eat their stems, and all that massive amount of biomass did nothing but suck carbon out of the atmosphere. And now we're working hard to put it all back in a tiny fraction of the time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @07:12PM
Why do you hate America, bro?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 19 2021, @11:10AM (2 children)
How is this informative?? Plain fucking wrong. Fungus (your 'rot') exists longer than the trees.
Ever heard of bogs? Notice how they work today, unless you go ahead and destroy them.
It's like education doesn't exist anymore
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday July 19 2021, @01:24PM
Yes, rot existed longer than trees - but for a *very* long time after wood first evolved, rot couldn't digest it. The same newly-evolved stabilizing molecule that made plant material strong and woody (lignin I think?) also prevented rot, and anything else, from being able to digest it.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday July 19 2021, @01:34PM
And yes, there are other ways to prevent rot under very particular circumstances - even just rapidly and permanently submerging it can preserve it for centuries. There's whole companies dedicated to logging the old forests that were submerged under artificial lakes.
But they weren't necessary during that roughly 80 million year window when wood everywhere on Earth failed to decompose because nothing could eat it, and just got slowly buried under ever more dust and biomass instead, with the heat and pressure eventually turning it into coal.