Environment & Energy
Related: About this forum'Apocalyptic' fires are ravaging the world's largest tropical wetland
25 SEPTEMBER 2020
Infernos in South Americas Pantanal region have burnt twice the area of Californias fires this year. Researchers fear the rare ecosystem will never recover.
Emiliano Rodríguez Mega
Firefighters and volunteers in the Pantanal, Brazil, have been scrambling to rescue jaguars from extreme fires.Credit: Andre Penner/AP/Shutterstock
When Luciana Leite arrived in the Pantanal on 2 September, she thought she would be celebrating her wedding anniversary. Instead, the biologist and her husband spent their eight-day planned holiday aiding volunteers and firefighters struggling to extinguish the burning landscape.
A common destination for ecotourists, the Pantanal is the worlds largest tropical wetland, home to Indigenous peoples and a high concentration of rare or endangered species, such as jaguars and giant armadillos. Small fires occur every year in the region, which sprawls over parts of western Brazil and extends into Bolivia and Paraguay.
But 2020s fires have been unprecedented in extent and duration, researchers say. So far, 22% of the vast floodplain around 3.2 million hectares (see Biodiversity Hotspot Under Threat) has succumbed to the flames, according to Renata Libonati, a remote-sensing specialist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, whose data are being used by firefighters to plan containment. Thats more than twice the area that has burnt in the record-breaking fires in California this year.
Scientists worry that the extreme blazes will profoundly alter the already fragile ecosystem of the Pantanal, and that research programmes investigating the regions ecology and biodiversity will never recover.
More:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02716-4
roamer65
(36,745 posts)Extinction.
SamKnause
(13,091 posts)It will happen sooner then most people are aware of.
Irreversible climate change and the 6th mass extinction are underway.
roamer65
(36,745 posts)And it's really gonna hurt on the way out too.