Burning issues - FLPA Revaluing the leaf
THIS month Jennifer Balch will head into the Amazon rainforest of Mato Grosso state, in Brazil. She intends to set fire to it and find out what happens. When Dr Balch, who is based at Woods Hole Research Centre, in Massachusetts, and her 30 helpers have finished their weeklong task, 50 hectares will have been torched. “It’s pretty darn exciting, and a bit crazy”, she says, “to see a bunch of researchers running around burning down a forest.”
The questions that prompt all this destruction are important. The first is: will tropical forests survive the increasing occurrence of wildfires as the climate changes and people move in, or will the landscape shift from one ruled by trees to one dominated by grassland? The second is: how much carbon do such wildfires release into the atmosphere?
Wildfires are certainly a problem in Brazil. During the droughts of 1997 and 1998, which were linked to El Niño, an irregular warming of the Pacific Ocean, 39,000 square kilometres of Amazonian forest were burned by such fires. That is twice the area deliberately cut down in Brazil each year between 1988 and 2005.
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