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Rampant Wildfires Are Threatening a Collapse of the Amazon Rainforest
Rainforests in South America are burning this year faster than ever before, setting the course for a collapse of the Amazon in the coming decades.
This historic drought, the most severe ever recorded in the Amazon, has also been amplified by the El Niño weather phenomenon —a cyclical climate pattern defined by unusually warm temperatures over the central and eastern Pacific Ocean, which typically lasts for 9 to 12 months. Record-high temperatures and this extreme drought have sapped the Amazon’s trees of their moisture, leaving the forest understory littered with woody debris that has grown dry, primed to ignite. If the Amazon were to undergo a “large-scale collapse” by 2050, as Flores and his colleagues warn, it may emit as much as 120 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, currently equivalent to about 3.5 years of global CO 2 emissions.
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