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July 14, 2021
by Marlowe Hood
Climate change and deforestation have changed much of the Amazon Basin from ingesting CO2 to emitting the planet, a transformation that could turn mankind’s greatest natural ally into an enemy in the fight against global warming, reported Researchers on Wednesday.
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Hundreds of high altitude air samples collected over the past decade have shown that the southeastern Amazon in particular has transformed from a « sink » to a source of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, they reported in the journal Nature.
Terrestrial ecosystems around the world are vital as the world struggles to contain carbon emissions, which exceeded 40 billion tons in 2019.
Over the past half century, plants and soils have consistently absorbed more than a quarter of these emissions, even though CO2 pollution has increased by 50 percent.
The Amazon basin contains about half of the world’s tropical rainforests, which absorb and store carbon more effectively than other vegetation.
If the Amazon – with 450 billion tons of CO2 in its trees and soils – becomes a constant source and not would become a « sink » of CO2, tackling the climate crisis would be a far greater challenge.
« Deforestation and forest degradation both reduce the Amazon’s ability to act as a carbon sink, » the authors noted.
Since In 1970, the region’s tropical forests shrank by 17 percent, mainly to provide grazing land for livestock and the plants that feed them.
Forests are generally cleared by fire, which both releases large amounts of CO2 and reduces the number of trees available to absorb CO2.
The dry season temperatures are compared almost three degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels, three times the global annual average.
Taken together, these factors cast doubt on « the ability of tropical forests to store large amounts of CO2 from fossil fuels in the future, » noted Scott Denning , an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University, in a comment, also in Nature.
The extent to which the Amazon basin was losing its ability to absorb CO2 has long been a burning question, but satellite data – in part due to the persistent cloud cover – couldn’t give full answer.
To get around this problem, researchers led by Luciana Gatti from the National Institute for Space f Research in Sao Jose dos Campos in Brazil from 2010 to 2018 with airplanes collected almost 600 CO2 and carbon monoxide samples at heights of up to 4.5 kilometers (2.8 kilometers) above the forest floor.
They found that the northwestern Amazon was in the carbon balance and absorbed as much CO2 into the atmosphere as it gave off.
Another recent study using a different methodology found that the Brazilian Amazon released almost 20 percent more CO2 in the past decade when he absorbed from 2010 to 2019.
Above a certain threshold of global warming, global warming could turn the rainforest tip of the continent into a much drier savannah state, as recent research has shown.
This would have devastating consequences for both the region, which is currently a significant part of global biodiversity, as well as global.
Ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica, Siberian permafrost soils full of CO2 and methane, monsoon rains in South Asia, coral reef ecosystems, the jet stream – all are prone to point-of-no-return Transitions that would radically change the world we know.
© 2021 AFP
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