Severe drought grips the Amazon rainforest: The impact, cause and grim future

Subject: Environment

Section: Ecosystem

Context:

The Amazon rainforest is reeling from an intense drought. Numerous rivers vital for travel have dried up. As a result, there is no water, food, or medicine in villages of Indigenous communities living in the area.

Details:

The Rio Negro, one of the world’s largest rivers by discharge levels, has fallen to a record low level of 13.59 metres near the city of Manaus.
Amazon, called the planet’s lungs, covers nearly seven million square kilometers, or about the area of Australia, and stores more than 150 billion metric tonnes of carbon.
In the past five decades, between 17 and 20 percent of the Amazon has been destroyed.

Stranded boats, wildfires, dead fish:

Water levels have dropped and high numbers of fish and river dolphins, known as boto, have been washing up dead.
The lack of water has also stalled the operations of a major hydropower dam.
The extreme dry conditions have made the rainforest more vulnerable to wildfires.
- So far this month, the Amazonas state has witnessed 2,700 blazes — the highest ever noted for the month of October since the records began 25 years ago.
Smoke from wildfires has plummeted air quality in Manaus, a city in the middle of the Amazon, to hazardous levels.

The combined effect of El Nino and high sea surface temperatures:

This drought event is more severe as two simultaneous natural events have hindered cloud formation, further reducing the already low rainfall levels in the region.

The onset of El Nino: which refers to an abnormal warming of surface waters in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. The weather pattern is known to increase the likelihood of breaking temperature records and triggers more extreme heat in many parts of the world and in the ocean.
The unusually high water temperatures in the northern tropical Atlantic Ocean. Due to warmer ocean waters, heated air rises into the atmosphere, which then reaches the Amazon rainforest. The warm air inhibits the formation of clouds, causing rainfall to drop sharply.

A grim future:

Several studies have indicated that with rising global temperatures, the Amazon will experience longer and more frequent droughts.
The Amazon has become slower at recovering from longer periods of drought over the past 20 years and is nearing its tipping point. Beyond the tipping point, it would transform from a lush green forest into a drier open savanna, releasing a large amount of stored carbon, which would, in turn, exacerbate global warming.

Amazon Rainforests:

The Amazon rainforest or Amazonia constitutes close to 1.3% of the planet’s surface and 4.1% of the earth’s land surface, but as a biome, the Amazon is host to 10% of the world’s wildlife species and some more, as we are still discovering new species in this epic mass of life in Latin America.
Some of the species found in the Amazon are not found anywhere else.
The Amazon itself is the largest river by volume of water in the world, draining from Iquitos in Peru, across Brazil and discharging into the Atlantic ocean.
Countries with amazon rainforests: 60% of it is in Brazil, 13% is in Peru, 8% in Bolivia, 7% and 6% respectively in Colombia and Venezuela, and nearly 3% each in Guyana and Suriname and around 1% in French Guiana and Ecuador.
Ecological contributions:
- In all, by storing around 76 billion tonnes of carbon, the Amazon rainforest helps stabilise the world’s climate.
- Moisture from the Amazon is responsible for rainfall for many parts of Latin America, contributing to agriculture, storage of water in urban reservoirs as well.

Source: IE