You may be right, Shaxhome. This is even a worse drought than the major one in the early 1970s, for sure a much more widely ranging drought now. Under normal circumstances near the equator there ought to be two rainy seasons and two dry seasons. Sometimes the lesser rainy season doesn't deliver much rain. This pattern seems to have failed.

Large tracks of Amazonian forests are naturally flooded during the normal main rainy season. These forests slowly drain away thus maintaining tributary river levels. By removing such forests, drainage is accelerated and the whole microclimate begins to change to more xeric ones.

This pattern is well known and pretty well understood from similar landuse histories in African Subsaharan regions.

On the other hand, large parts of Brazil have always been subject to periodic extreme drought.

Patrick Alexander

Patrick,
I'm so relieved to hear that this is just a normal cycle and that the Amazon will restore itself, and that its effects on world climate (amongst other things!) are self-correcting ....
Perhaps this link will better explain my exasperation and despair...

Regards,

Shax

Here is a link that might be useful: Oh oh!

Last week, the journal Science reported that using ultra high resolution satellite imagery, researches found the tree loss estimates from previous years should be doubled due to selective logging. I don't know how long this will take to self-correct.

Here is a link that might be useful: selective logging

"I'm so relieved to hear that this is just a normal cycle and that the Amazon will restore itself, and that its effects on world climate (amongst other things!) are self-correcting ...."

That's not quite what I said.

My point was that we can't jump to conclusions, in either direction. Just because deforestation is bad and there's lots of it in Brazil doesn't mean that this drought was caused by deforestation.

The first step in trying to figure out how to solve any problem is trying to figure out what the cause was. We can't skip that step.

Patrick Alexander