TROUBLE IN THE AMAZON

TROUBLE IN THE AMAZON

The land ecosystems of the world together absorb about 30% of the carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels; scientists think that most of this takes place in forests, and the Amazon is by far the world's largest contiguous forest. Since 2010, Gatti has collected air samples over the Amaz...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature (London) 2023-08, Vol.620 (7975), p.712-716
Main Author: Grossman, Daniel
Format: Article
Language:eng
Subjects:
Air sampling
Airports
Atmospheric models
Carbon dioxide
Carbon sequestration
Carbon sinks
Climate change
Climate models
Corn
Deforestation
Ecologists
Farms
Forests
Fossil fuels
Global climate
Pilots
Rainforests
Scientists
Timber
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Summary:The land ecosystems of the world together absorb about 30% of the carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels; scientists think that most of this takes place in forests, and the Amazon is by far the world's largest contiguous forest. Since 2010, Gatti has collected air samples over the Amazon in planes such as this one, to monitor how much CO2 the forest absorbs. In 2021, she reported data from 590 flights that showed that the Amazon forest's uptake - its carbon sink - is weak over most of its area1. In 2016, using climate models, he and his colleagues predicted that the combination of unchecked deforestation and global climate change would eventually push the Amazon forest past a "tipping point", transforming the climate across a vast swathe of the Amazon2. Scott Denning, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins who has collaborated with Gatti, says that her research has been an "amazingly logistically difficult project".
ISSN:0028-0836
1476-4687