Articles by ecothrust at Technorati Headline Animator

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Was Amazon Drought & Aussie Floods A Nature Cycle Shift

http://bit.ly/7XwAG


Though I will not blame it on human consumption induced climate change or global warming, the ominous signs of the nature cycle shift is in the air. No, I am not talking of the cataclysmic rainfall followed by floods in Queensland  and Northern Australia early this year or the snow storms that raged across Europe and the northern hemisphere from North America to  China . I am in fact talking of the  depleting Amazon rain forests due to the droughts of 2005 and 2010 that have killed billions of trees over thousands of acres along the parched tributaries of the giant river.  Here below and above are some telling pictures of how it looks now that one of the biggest tributary Rio Negro has turned into a dried out river bed and the forests have turned into grasslands


The dried out river banks which are miles wide at most places and stretch for hundreds of miles after the 2010 drought.


Acres of  rain forests have disappeared and have been replaced by grasslands in the Amazon

Brazil's Rio Negro is a major tributary of the Amazon and a home to an ecosystem that  supports millions of plant and animal species. The 2005 and 2010 droughts dried out parts of the river and killed billions of trees
Researcher Simon Lewis in Science magazine wrote that according to a few models the quick and successive droughts in the Amazon basis is a freak phenomenon and could be due to changes in the temperature level in the Atlantic that has occurred due to man made warming.

Researchers also say that the drought and the death of billions of  trees within months would not only affect the  capability of a large part of the  Amazonian rain forest  to act like a carbon sink, but that it could eventually become a carbon source leading to increased global emissions.  Applying the techniques of  extrapolation researches feel that the mass destruction of trees due to the two drought could have added 8 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere and thus caused further global warming that could bring about greater and more severe droughts in the future






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