Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
large parts of the rainforest. This is exactly what was seen during the two extreme
Amazon droughts of 2005 and 2010. This also returns the carbon stored in the rainforest
back into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change. The savannah would then take
over those burnt areas, as it is adapted to coping with the long dry season, but savannah
has a much lower carbon storage potential per km
2
than rainforest. However, this concern
was premature, as other climate models could not find the same extreme response of the
climate over Amazonia. Key to this was the Coupled Carbon Cycle Climate Model Inter-
comparison Project (C
4
MIP), which compared global climate models that include an in-
teractive vegetation and carbon cycle. The results of C
4
MIP and the opinion of the latest
IPCC review is that it is unlikely that a sustained dieback of the Amazon rainforest will
occur this century due to climate change. However, deforestation is still occurring in the
Amazon due to logging, mining, and the expansion of agriculture. Moreover, the huge
droughts of 2005 and 2010 did show how vulnerable the Amazon rainforest is to extreme
variations in dry-season length. While much of the damage has started to grow back, there
still is concern about long-term loss due to direct human impacts.
