Scientists say deforestation is already reshaping the rainforest in profound ways. Among them is Amazon specialist Bruce Fosberg, who has spent half a century studying the forest.<\/p>\n
He climbs 15 stories up a narrow tower that rises 45 metres above a pristine rainforest reserve in the heart of the Amazon. From a small platform at the top, he looks out over a sea of green stretching to the horizon.<\/p>\n
The tower is bristling with high-tech instruments – sensors that track almost everything happening between the forest and the atmosphere: water vapor, carbon dioxide, sunlight, and essential nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus.<\/p>\n
The tower was built 27 years ago and is part of a project – the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment (LBA) – that aims to understand how the Amazon is changing, and how close it is to a critical threshold.<\/p>\n
Data from the LBA together with other scientific studies show parts of the rainforest may be nearing a “tipping point”, after which the ecosystem can no longer maintain its own functions.<\/p>\n
“The living forest is closing down,” he says, “and not producing water vapour and therefore rainfall”.<\/p>\n
As trees are lost to deforestation, fire, and heat stress, the forest releases less moisture into the atmosphere, he explains, reducing rainfall and intensifying drought. That, in turn, creates a feedback loop that kills even more trees.<\/p>\n
The fear is that, if this continues, vast areas of rainforest could die away and become a savannah or dry grassland ecosystem.<\/p>\n
Such a collapse would release huge amounts of carbon, disrupt weather patterns across continents, and threaten the millions of people \u2013 as well as the countless plant, insect and animal species \u2013 whose lives depend on the Amazon for survival.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scientists say deforestation is already reshaping the rainforest in profound ways. Among them is Amazon specialist Bruce Fosberg,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267429,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[1397,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-267428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267428\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}