(ORDO NEWS) — An international team of climate scientists has found evidence that cutting down trees in the Amazon rainforest is affecting the weather in Tibet, more than 15,000 kilometers from the Amazon.
The Amazon rainforest is one of the “key points” on our planet, which is now under enormous pressure due to human activities.
As tree-cutting increases, the Amazon is step by step approaching the “point of no return,” after which the rainforest cannot be restored, even if all the loggers return home and the environmentalists plant new trees.
After collecting planetary climate data from 1979 to 2019 (the same time that the Amazonian forests are most massively cut down), scientists from China, Germany, Sweden and Israel came to the conclusion that deforestation of northern South America had a significant impact on temperatures in the Tibetan Plateau and in western Antarctica.
They also noticed an inverse relationship with rainfall: if it rained in the Amazon, the skies cleared in Tibet and Antarctica.
The researchers were able to trace the path of climate change as the area of rainforest decreased. They found that this route led through southern Africa, then to the Arabian Peninsula, and finally to Tibet, where for many years there has been a steady decrease in the area of snow cover.
The entire “climatic journey” takes about two weeks. Scientists have suggested that the physical carriers of climate change are the South Atlantic High, the intertropical convergence zone and the westerly winds of the temperate zone.
The discovery of such a stable relationship between places separated by more than 15 thousand kilometers cannot but cause concern, especially in connection with the increasing risk of the collapse of the entire Amazonian ecosystem, which is now close to the critical point.
In particular, a further increase in temperature over the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could lead to the collapse of its glaciers, as happened with the Larsen Ice Shelf in 2002.
This will lead to the disintegration of the Antarctic ice sheet and an increase in the level of the world‘s oceans, and ultimately affect the climate around the globe.
—
Online:
Contact us: [email protected]
Our Standards, Terms of Use: Standard Terms And Conditions.