As I’m sure we all remember, Twitter blew up during the month of Aug. Many were expressing their feelings about the Amazon Forest burning for days before anyone in the United States actually reported it to a wide audience. Because of this incident at the Amazon, many were furious and it brought to light how helpful the forest is for sustaining life on the planet.
Courtesy: Sebastian Liste/TIME
The Amazon rainforest historically experienced more fires during the month of Sep. than in the summer. While this probably does not make much sense to us as the summertime is typically hotter, these forest fires were not only a result of natural causes, but of encounters of deforestation. While this news may be enraging to discover, though a little relieving that these fires are dwindling now, here are some things many may not know:
While 58,476 fires were reported sweeping through the Amazon as of Aug. 24, this number remains well below the amount recorded during the mid-2000s as deforestation rates were much more devastating. In 2010, emissions were 83 percent correlated with Amazonian fires and reached about 275 teragrams of carbon as reported by WUWT. And between the years of 2003 and 2015, both deforestation, as well as forest fires, dropped tremendously. Deforestation specifically by about 76 percent, presented by Carbon Brief. This visual can be better seen by visiting the “Number of active hotspots by month in the Brazilian Amazon since June 1999” visual below and on Mongabay News & Inspiration from Nature’s Front Line, where the delineation is clearly displayed between 2019 Amazon forest fires in comparison to the years prior.
Courtesy: INPE/Mongabay
This may possibly bring some peace of mind to those who believed reports of breaking-record fires taking over the Amazon, and while deforestation continues to be an issue for such a large ecosystem of dense tree population, it is decreasing every year.
Nonetheless, it is thrilling to know that the fires many tweeted about in Aug. are subsiding from the magnitude in which they grew during the summer months.
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