Word: raining
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...This deliberate tree murder?call it selvacide?was the very purpose of the Christo-like covering of the rain-forest floor. The eerie area was the center of a $700,000, U.S.- and Brazil-financed experiment to slowly starve a patch of rain forest of life-sustaining moisture and see what happens as a result. The seemingly sadistic effort was a controlled version of what biologists fear happens periodically all across the Amazon, the precursor of a disaster that could be only a few years, or even months, away...
...There is plenty of evidence to support Nepstad?s concern. Almost every year, more and more of the rain forest is going up in smoke. In 1998, in the wake of the weather shifts brought on by El Ni?o?s warming the Pacific waters off South America, some 40,000 sq km of the Brazilian Amazon was scorched. Smoke-related ailments killed 700 people, put more than 10,000 in the hospital, according to ipam, and afflicted tens of thousands of others who did not show up in official statistics. The following year, when Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso tried...
...soil at the bottom of the Tapaj?s pit is one clue to the nature of this potential catastrophe. Rain-forest trees suck moisture from as deep as 18 m beneath the fragile surface of the land. During periodic droughts, such as occurred during 1998?s El Ni?o, vegetation can rapidly deplete this groundwater, desiccating trees and turning them into potential torches...
...which runs 1,741 km north and east from Campo Grande in Mato Grosso do Sul to the city of Santar?m in Par?. The 700-km unpaved section runs directly past Tapaj?s National Forest and on through millions of hectares of the most vulnerable parts of the rain forest. Says Nepstad: ?Brazilian scientists call this area the ?corridor of drought,? and it becomes kindling when El Ni?o roars through...
...Nepstad argues that the costs to the forest will far offset those gains. More settlers will flood in, and fires will follow the settlers. Moreover, fire begets fire in the Amazon. Dead trees provide the fuel for successive burnings, and cleared areas are often 12?C hotter than the rain-forest floor, which has a leafy canopy that blocks and absorbs as much as 99% of incoming sunlight...