Word: droughts
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...Amazon more vulnerable than ever before. Of most concern is the heightened impact of El Nino, the periodic warming of Pacific waters that plays havoc with the world's weather. El Nino helped cause the 1998 Amazon dry spell, and ecologist Nepstad has studied the vicious circle of drought and fire. The first year of drying and burning sucks vital moisture from the soil and leaves the forest littered with tinder. Sheltering leaves that ordinarily prevent the forest floor from baking in the sun are thinned out. The rainy season may provide a brief respite, but during the next...
...Tapajos National Forest and linking the Amazon River with southern Brazil. As has happened throughout the Amazon basin, the completion of the highway will open the forest to settlers, and they will undoubtedly set fires to clear land near the road. This area, however is regularly hit by drought and is perhaps the most vulnerable part of the forest. Fires here could grow into the worst conflagration the Amazon has ever seen. Daniel Nepstad, an ecologist who divides his time between the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts and the Amazon Institute for Environmental Research in Belem, Brazil, warns that...
...there has been a commendable news drought during this presidential election and I laud the media for their conscientious neglect of issues concerning the private lives of Vice President Al Gore '69 and Texas Gov. George W. Bush. Granted, there were forays into the personal lives of the two presidential front-runners, such as Bush's alleged stint with cocaine and the public release of Gore's Harvard report card, but for the most part this has been a clean media campaign. Journalists have done their fair share of probing into the pasts of the Democratic and Republican nominees...
...Repeated over the years, the combination of drought, human despoiling and fire can transform wet tropical forest into permanent savanna. So argues Bruce Nelson, an ecologist who has worked since 1979 with inpa, the Brazilian institute for the study of the Amazon. Nelson believes pre-Columbian Indians created the Gran Sabana in Venezuela, a 75,000-sq-km area of veld stretching across the southeast corner of the country, by repeated burning of the forest. As evidence, he points out that unlike neighboring natural grasslands, the Gran Sabana lacks fire-tolerant tree species. In other words, forests burned down hundreds...
...what Nepstad fears will happen after the paving of BR-163. Only this time the invasions will take place in the most fire-prone region of the dense tropical forest. The forest could disappear along the road in the blink of an eye. A single El Ni?o?inspired drought could do the trick if the road were paved and settlers had invaded. If this happens, scientists estimate that one burning season could destroy 100,000 sq km of forest, more than twice what was destroyed in all Brazil...