What Is The Amazon “Tipping Point,” Exactly?
And what will it mean for the future of our planet?
At 6.7 million square kilometers in size — an area about twice the size of India — the Amazon Rainforest accounts for half of the remaining rainforest on Earth. It is the largest swathe of contiguous forest left on the planet, and it is home to more than 10 percent of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity: 2.5 million species of insects; 40,000 species of plants; 2,500 species of trees; 1,300 species of birds; hundreds of species of mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. The trees of the Amazon store between 15 and 20 years worth of global carbon dioxide emissions, and the rainforest has a “net cooling effect that helps to stabilize the Earth’s climate,” to borrow the words of a recent Nature paper, largely thanks to the volumes of water that these trees absorb from the soil and evapotranspire into the atmosphere.
“For 65 million years, Amazonian forests remained relatively resilient to climatic variability,” the recent Nature study states. “Now, the region is increasingly exposed to unprecedented stress from warming temperatures, extreme droughts, deforestation and fires, even in central and remote parts of the system.”
The Amazon Basin has been warming at an average of 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade since the 1980s. The forest’s…
