Amazon
Rainforest Wildfires Scorch Through Drought-Plagued Brazil During
Southern Hemisphere Winter
20
August, 2014
It’s
Winter. Sections
of Brazil are experiencing their worst drought in 84 years. Sao
Paulo, a city of 9 million, has 97 days of water supply left. And,
again, the Great Rainforest is burning.
Over
the past few decades a combination of insults including clear
cutting, slash and burn agriculture, and rising instances of
heatwaves and drought driven by human-caused climate change has
resulted in increasingly severe impacts to forested regions around
and within the Amazon. Major fires, which were once almost unheard of
in the damp, wet regions of the great Amazon delta first cropped up
in the late 1980s and early 1990s but have since become more widespread
.
(Wildfire outbreak in the Amazon on August 13, 2014. For reference bottom edge of frame is 180 miles. Image source: LANCE MODIS.)
Now,
a combination of basement burning of root systems in the Amazon,
heat, and drought are resulting in a kind of existential crisis for a
region that has been described by scientists as ‘the Earth’s
lungs.’ It is a situation that brings with it the ever-increasing
risk of major fire outbreaks. And as of 2012 and 2013, after a period
of ever-increasing burning, dry equatorial winters have brought with
them extraordinarily severe fires that have torn through forested
zones and threatened infrastructure. In
one such instance during 2013, a major region-wide blackout was set
off by a fire originating in Brazil’s rainforest.
And
now the burning has begun anew.
For
as of August 13 of this year, large wildfires were erupting within
the Amazon near regions of cleared forest and deep within the forest
interior. Over the past week, these fires expanded and became more
widespread. Now, much of Brazil is under a pall of smoke from
wildfires that have expanded to range over a very broad rainforest
region.
(Smoke from wildfires covering almost all of the Amazon on August 20, 2014. For reference, bottom edge of frame is 1,000 miles and the Amazon River flows from middle left until it terminates at upper right into the South Atlantic. Image source: LANCE MODIS.)
News
media and public reporting of fire instances within Brazil are
sketchy. But the satellite picture doesn’t lie. Observational
estimates place these fires in the range of 500,000 to 1,500,000
acres initially. But given the fire intensity, they are likely to
burn on for weeks to months.
Conditions
in Context: 3 Percent of the Amazon Lost To Fire From 1999-2010
The
new fires originated in a region now known to harbor ongoing
understory fires. These fires burn beneath the interlaced root
systems of the Amazon and have been discovered to continue to smolder
year-round. During times of intense heat and drought, these fires can
break through to the surface and more intensely burn through large
swaths of forestland. After burning, they sink back into the
understory, waiting for another heat/drought trigger.
Last
year, NASA published a study which found that fully 3 percent of the
Amazon had been lost to fires during the period of 1999-2010. A
primary culprit for these losses was found to be understory fires,
which NASA identified as a significant threat to the Amazon forest
system.
(1.2 million square miles of Amazon forest burned from 1999-2010 according to a 2013 NASA study. Location of fires indicated in orange.)
Perhaps
most significantly, the NASA study implicated climate change as the
primary cause for these fires, finding that drought and heatwaves
related to increases in human heat trapping gasses had depleted
ground moisture levels, resulting in a greatly increased instance of
fires.
Post
2010, the satellite record indicates that these fires have continued
to grow in intensity. And so the risk to the Amazon expands.
Overall,
the Amazon currently stores about 120 gigatons of carbon. It
represents about 10% of the global uptake of carbon from the
atmosphere through forest tree and plant respiration. But as the
Amazon burns and becomes deforested, it shifts from being a carbon
absorber to a carbon emitter. Currently, depleted and burning areas
of the Amazon are estimated to emit 500 megatons of CO2 each year.
And though this has not yet tipped the balance to make the Amazon a
net carbon emitter, human climate change and deforestation is driving
the world’s largest rainforest rapidly in that direction.
Under
human driven climate change and deforestation, the heat and drought
situation will only worsen for Brazil. Even without clear cutting,
the fires will expand and, eventually, the rainforest will be
consumed. Without substantial mitigation action by humans, it is
bound to happen. The vast carbon store that is the rainforest will
almost certainly begin adding to the already rapacious human heating
effect. A process that will continue for decades and will only end
once the rainforest is gone entirely.
Links:
Hat
tip to Bernard
When rain forests start burning and a our largest carbon absorber becomes a carbon emitter you would have to think we are in trouble.
ReplyDeleteThe long hoped for El Nino seems to have petered out and California looks like running out of water putting 20m peoples water supply in trouble."Sao Paulo, a city of 9 million, has 97 days of water supply left. And, again, the Great Rainforest is burning." The lungs of the planet are discharging carbon not oxygen, how long do you think that will go on?
Don't worry, nothing to see nothing to worry about, the cops aren't being militarised to prepare for collapse........... Honest.
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