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Amazon rainforest ‘could become a desert’

Daily Times Monitor

LAHORE: The vast Amazon rainforest is on the verge of being turned into desert, with catastrophic consequences for the world’s climate, alarming research suggests.

And the process, which would be irreversible, could begin as early as next year.

Geoffrey Lean and Fred Pearce, writing for The Independent on Sunday, quote studies conducted by the blue-chip Woods Hole Research Centre in Amazonia as concluding that the forest cannot withstand more than two consecutive years of drought without breaking down.

“Scientists say that this would spread drought into the northern hemisphere, including Britain, and could massively accelerate global warming with incalculable consequences, spinning out of control, a process that might end in the world becoming uninhabitable,” Lean and Pearce report.

The news comes amidst a heat wave in Britain and much of Europe and the United States. It is also in the wake of a warning by an international group of experts that the forest is reaching a “tipping point” that would lead to its total destruction, the Independent reports. Lean and Pearce say that the research has taken even the scientists conducting it by surprise.

“When Dr Dan Nepstead started the experiment in 2002 – by covering a chunk of rainforest the size of a football pitch with plastic panels to see how it would cope without rain – he surrounded it with sophisticated sensors, expecting to record only minor changes,” The Independent reports.

“The trees managed the first year of drought without difficulty. In the second year, they sunk their roots deeper to find moisture, but survived. But in year three, they started dying. Beginning with the tallest the trees started to come crashing down, exposing the forest floor to the drying sun.

By the end of the year the trees had released more than two-thirds of the carbon dioxide they have stored during their lives, helping to act as a break on global warming. Instead they began accelerating the climate change.”

Lean and Pearce report that the Amazon was entering its second successive year of drought, and could start dying as early as next year. It contains 90 billion tonnes of carbon, enough to increase the rate of global warming by 50 percent.

“Dr Nepstead expects ‘mega-fires’ rapidly to sweep across the drying jungle. With the trees gone, the soil will bake in the sun and the rainforest could become desert,” The Independent reports.

“Dr Deborah Clark from the University of Missouri, one of the world’s top forest ecologists, says the research shows that ‘the lock has broken’ on the Amazon ecosystem. She adds: the Amazon is ‘headed in a terrible direction’.”

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