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Floating houses in a dried-up port in Iranduba, Amazonas, on October 4: Severe drought can also cause sudden tree mortalityBruno Zanardo / Getty ImagesAnyone who hasn’t seen the recent images of dried-up rivers in the Amazon, leaving dead dolphins and riverside communities with little water or food, must live on another planet. Climate and ecology experts are greatly concerned about the effects of climate change in this region, which may be even greater than estimated. “A worry is that climate models may underestimate the sensitivity of the forest-climate system. If this is the case, the Amazon may be in imminent danger of crossing climate or deforestation thresholds that can result in large-scale loss,” wrote British chemist Dominick Spracklen of the University of Leeds, UK, and meteorologist Caio Coelho of the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE) in a comment on an article published in Science Advances by researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. The dynamic climate model described in the article includes interactions between the forest, the atmosphere, and the climate, and indicates the consequences of reduced evapotranspiration due to the removal of trees and the increased atmospheric moisture due to temperature changes. Sudden tree mortality when the soil becomes less moist is also considered in the model. Together, these interactions can lead to drastic and sudden impacts, more severe than other models have predicted when considering the level of deforestation or warming that would take the rainforest beyond a point of no return (Science Advances, October 4).
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