2 Of 3 Worst Amazon Basin Droughts Ever Have Occurred In Past 5 Years - Rivers Still Dropping - NYT

[hatrack]

You can learn a lot muddling around a forest in the middle of nowhere, but you also learn a lot once you’re back in the city catching up on your e-mail. In the field we worried about why it was raining so little. Back in Iquitos, Peru, we discovered that our field work had coincided with the worst drought ever recorded in the Amazon basin. Reading the previous two-and-a-half weeks of e-mail, it was possible to track the drought’s progress through the newsletters I receive every few days from a Brazilian research institute.

First there was a note saying that the river level gauge at Manaus was at the twelfth lowest stage in recorded history. A few days later, a note said it was at the second lowest stage in history, and then, on Oct. 26, a note confirmed that the river had dropped to the lowest recorded level since measuring began 108 years ago. That was the same day we arrived at our third camp, where the Yaguas River was 23 feet below its floodplain and the tributary next to camp had practically run dry. The low readings at Manaus did not make front-page news back home, but maybe they deserved to: Two of the three worst Amazon droughts in history have now occurred within the last five years,­ the sort of coincidence that also turns up in conversations these days about icebergs and hurricanes and Siberian heat waves.

But the drought was definitely news in Iquitos, where people were deeply upset by the lack of rain. It was unsettling, too, for our little band of biologists to be writing about the drought on laptops powered by Iquitos’s gas-fired power plant, located in a part of Peru where roughly half of the landscape is currently inside oil and gas concessions.

Long dry spells like these in Amazonia wither crops and worsen air pollution and cut off whole towns from the rest of the world, when the arm of the river they’re on turns to mud. They also destroy forests. Scientists used to think that if the guys with chainsaws could be convinced to stop cutting down trees, tropical deforestation would just stop. We now know that if all the guys with chainsaws stopped cutting down trees tomorrow morning, Amazonian forests might disappear anyway, thanks to higher temperatures, droughts, and forest fires. Guys with chainsaws, meet guys with laptops (and air conditioners, station wagons, and blogs). But there was some good news in the inbox, too. While we were in the field, the Peruvian government had declared a large new park west of Iquitos, which will protect a wonderful wilderness area along the Peru-Ecuador border.

EDIT

http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/drought-in-the-amazon-up-close-and-personal/?partner=rss&emc=rss

[Crazy Dave]

1. My yard and all the ponds in my neighborhood are completely dry

I've had the same wiper blades for over two years.

[dpbrown]

2. When there are no ice caps, we turn into Mars

See how that turned out?

[cliffordu]

3. Yep. Perfect.

[kickysnana]

4. +1

[joshcryer]

6. Not sure about that. Mars lost its magnetic field early on.

We still, fortunately, are protected.

And Mars still has some pretty impressive ice caps. It's northern ice cap holds more water ice than Antarctica.

[jimlup]

5. I was in Inquitos this past summer as this low water season was beginning

I wonder how the people I meet are fairing.