The largest freshwater tank on the planet is in trouble. The Amazon rainforest, through which a fifth of the world’s fresh water flows, has been suffering from a powerful drought that shows no signs of letting up.
The drought, likely exacerbated by global warming and deforestation, has sparked massive forest fires that have made the air dangerous for millions of people.including indigenous communities, at the same time that it has dried up important rivers.
One major river reached its lowest level ever documented on October 16, while others have approached records, suffocating endangered pink dolphins, shutting down a major hydroelectric plant and isolating tens of thousands in remote communities.
“Now there is only land where the river used to be,” said Ruth Martins, 50, a leader of Boca do Mamirauá, a small riverside community.
Dry conditions are accelerating the destruction of the world’s largest and most biodiverse rainforest, where some parts have begun to transform from humid ecosystems that store huge amounts of heat-trapping gases to drier ecosystems that release those gases into the atmosphere — a double whammy for the global fight against climate change and biodiversity loss.
“This is a catastrophe with lasting consequences,” said Luciana Vanni Gatti, a scientist at Brazil’s National Space Research Institute. “The more forest loss we have, the less resilience it has.”
Recent studies have shown that climate change, deforestation and fires have made it difficult for the Amazon to recover from severe droughts.
Gatti warned that the worst could still be yet to come. The rainy season is anticipated to begin soon. If the drought that began in June persists, it would be the first time that such extreme conditions have taken hold in the Amazon’s driest period and continued into its wettest period.
In Tefé, a rural municipality in the northwest of the Amazon, residents have been paddling canoes down narrow streams that were once rivers. Some 158 riverside villages in the region were isolated, said Edivilson Braga, coordinator of the local civil defense service. He added that authorities have delivered thousands of basic food baskets, many of them via helicopters, to thousands of families.
Ayan Santos Fleischmann, a hydrologist at the Mamirauá Institute, a Tefé-based research organization, said the Amazon is now facing “simultaneous disasters”: low rainfall, scorching heat and soaring water temperatures.
“And what scares us the most is what awaits us,” he said.
Across the Amazon, wells and streams have dried up, leaving communities without drinking water. Some residents drink, cook and bathe in contaminated water.
“This water is making children sick; “It is making the elderly sick,” said Braga.
Health authorities are also concerned that puddles of stagnant, overheated water could be breeding grounds for mosquitoes that carry malaria and dengue.
The drought has affected countless animal species. In the warm Lake Tefé, the carcasses of more than 150 pink river dolphins have been found since September 23, Fleischmann said.
Much of the area’s destruction has been caused by the drier forest’s greater vulnerability to fires typically started by farmers and others clearing the land. Forest fires have consumed more than 46 thousand square kilometers of the Amazon this year. Smoke from forest fires made the air so dangerous in Manaus, a city of 2 million inhabitants, that it recently became one of the most polluted cities on the planet, reports the World Air Quality Index project.
According to experts, the lack of rain is largely due to two weather patterns. From the west, El Niño, which warms the Pacific waters near the Equator, has been gaining strength. From the southwest, high temperatures in the waters of the North Atlantic have accelerated the flow of air towards the Amazon, preventing the formation of rain clouds.
The drought of the rivers is also a serious blow to the region’s economy. Barges carrying corn bound for China and other countries were forced to cut their loads in half along a major river last month because the water was too shallow and river bed erosion caused it to collapse. of a port.
“We’re just praying for rain,” said Martins, the community leader.
By: ANA IONOVA and MANUELA ANDREONI
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6965099, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-11-01 22:20:07
#drought #affecting #Amazon