Word: forested
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...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 dry season, the remaining trees quickly exhaust soil moisture and become more susceptible to fire. When the giants burn...
...fire year, more than 15,000 sq. mi. of Brazil's rain forest went up in flames. Ecologists say the paving of BR-163 will put at risk 580,000 sq. mi.--one-third of the dense forest remaining in the Amazon region. To get an idea of the scale of the potential catastrophe, imagine all of Alaska as scorched earth...
Invasions of settlers can help make conditions even dryer. Land burned and cleared by farmers releases less water to the skies than forest does. Moreover, smoke inhibits rainfall by saturating the air with vast numbers of tiny particles, each of which can become the center of a water droplet. But the droplets remain tiny, and do not become heavy enough to fall to the ground, according to a study conducted by David Rosenfeld at Jerusalem University in Israel...
...paving of BR-163. In the Brazilian Amazon, roughly 75% of deforestation has occurred within 30 miles of a paved road. Despite laws prohibiting settlement in virgin lands, politicians, who see settlers as voters, have encouraged Brazil's 10 million landless poor to migrate into the interior, torching forest as they go. But the rain forest is not good agricultural land, and many of the farmers sell out to cattle ranchers. The only reason enormous stretches of the forest did not burn down in 1998 was that paved roads did not yet penetrate the most fragile areas...
...irony is that in the end agribusiness will suffer along with everyone else. The destruction of the rain forest could make drought more common all over Brazil, endangering soybean production. In the face of that peril, the government will have to decide whether short-term profits are worth risking an environmental disaster for Brazil--and the whole planet...