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Mahesh

20/10/23 06:57 AM IST

Arought grips the Amazon rainforest

In News
  • 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.
About Amazon forest
  • The Amazon rainforest is a wet broadleaf forest that takes up the majority of South America’s Amazon basin.
  • It flourished during the Eocene era allowing different species to evolve and survive. The vast forest plays a critical role in keeping the local and regional climate in check.
  • The Amazon rainforest spreads across nine countries namely Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela, Suriname, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Guyana, and French Guiana.
Reasons for drought 
  • 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.
  • Most recently, the rainforest witnessed a dry spell in 2021, which was the worst in at least 90 years.
  • The latest drought, however, is probably even more severe as two simultaneous natural events have hindered cloud formation, further reducing the already low rainfall levels in the region.
  • One of them is 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 other weather event is 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.
Stranded boats and wild fires
  • The present spell of drought began in June and has stubbornly persisted since. As a result, water levels have dropped and high numbers of fish and river dolphins, known as boto, have been washing up dead — their rotting carcasses have contaminated the water supply in some areas, forcing residents to use it for cooking, bathing, and drinking.
  • The lack of water has also stalled the operations of a major hydropower dam in the region and left tens of thousands of people stranded in remote jungle villages, with limited access to food, and other supplies. Brazilian authorities fear that about 500,000 people may be affected due to the drought by the end of October.
  • The extreme dry conditions have made the rainforest more vulnerable to wildfires too. 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 of two million in the middle of the Amazon, to hazardous levels. Children and older people living in the city are struggling to breathe and many have ended up in hospitals.
Way forward
  • In the past five decades, between 17 and 20 per cent of the Amazon has been destroyed.
  • Therefore, there is an urgent need to curb deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions to protect the Amazon, and, where possible, reforest the degraded swathes according to experts.
Source- Indian Express

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