There is an institution called the Hybam (Hydrology of the Amazon Basin) National Observation Service, where scientists worldwide cooperate in monitoring the Amazon rainforest. Its director, Jean-Michel Martinez, stresses that the fires in the Amazon, raging on for weeks now, will have consequences that are not yet measurable.
What they do know, however, is that the long-term effects will see a gradual destabilization of the water cycle. This is because the Amazon’s main role at the global level is maintaining the water cycle. Its waters, fed by evaporation, account for 20% of all waters that empty into the oceans, explains Martinez.
He warns:
“If you gradually cut down the forest, you take away the engine of evaporation that feeds the river and you’ll completely destabilize the ecosystem.”
As a result, modifying the water cycle risks losing the tropical forest altogether. It also intensifies the extreme events that affect the river, like drought and flooding. In the past 115 years, there have been six major floods in the Amazon. Four of them have occurred just in the past decade!
Over the past 15 years, Hybam has collected water samples from the river. The measurements of the samples show signs of pollution, mainly chlorine, in the river, “which did not exist before, it is due to oil and gas mining in its basin as well as gold and diamond mining,” says Martinez.
150 environmental experts from Hybam recently got together for a week-long meeting in Toulouse, France, to discuss the situation. They say that this pollution and the changes in the quality of the Amazon’s waters brought on by deforestation “could be partly responsible for the warming of the Atlantic Ocean and influence the emergence of tropical cyclones.”
The experts say that the focus shouldn’t be only on Brazil, even though the climate-skeptic president Jair Bolsonaro is under strong international pressure for the way he has managed the fires. In the end, it isn’t only him and his policies to blame; all of the countries of the Amazon Basin are connected to increased deforestation. This is why seven South American countries recently got together for an emergency summit in Colombia to sign an Amazon protection pact meant to help conserve and protect the primordial ecosystem and ‘lungs of the world.’
