Grossman: It’s quieter once we’ve landed and taxied into this big hangar. Usually the pilots she hires fly solo to collect the air samples she needs for her studies of carbon uptake. Grossman: Though she has studied the Amazon forest for decades, Luciana rarely gets an aerial tour such as this one. Most of that forest loss happened in the region we’re flying over right now. Just last year loggers in Brazil cleared an area nearly the size of Connecticut. But deforestation is taking its toll on the Amazon and weakening this essential carbon sink. Grossman: Scientists believe that the Amazon soaks up a major share of global forest uptake. Gatti: In our studies, we observed 70 percent increase in soybean plantation area. And when crops replace that forest, carbon uptake declines. That forest uptake slows the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and slows global warming. Here’s a little background: 30 percent of the carbon dioxide released globally by burning fossil fuel gets absorbed in soil and vegetation, probably mostly in forests. She hires this plane and others like it to collect air above the changing forest-because mixed in with that air is a key to climate change: carbon dioxide. I’ve come to the Amazon to find out what Luciana is learning about the health of the forest and its role in influencing the rate of climate change.Īnd the plane we’re on isn’t just used for taking in the view. Grossman: I’m Daniel Grossman, reporting for Science, Quickly. Gatti: They are killing the forest to transform everything into soybeans. Today all we see through the plane’s window glass are brown and green jigsaw puzzle pieces alternating between newly cleared jungle, grain crops and the remains of recent harvests. The few subsistence farms that interrupted this green ocean only seemed to prove how vast the jungle was. She says that back then, the land we’re looking down on was completely blanketed in green: the crowns of millions of trees, intertwined. Grossman: Luciana works at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. Luciana Gatti: You see? Recent deforestation here. We climb into the sky above the eastern Amazon in Brazil. I’m sitting next to her in a single-engine prop plane. Daniel Grossman: Climate researcher Luciana Gatti stares grimly out of an oval porthole.
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