Brazilian Amazon Basin Drought In 5th Month; Rivers At Record Lows, Fourth-Biggest Hydroelectric Plant Closed

[hatrack]

Ed. - If you've got time, click through to the article for the photographs - they're jaw-dropping, and what I've pasted here is more a thumbnail than anything else.

The Amazon — the lush, tropical basin that holds the world’s biggest river, rainforest and a fifth of its fresh water — is running dry. The region is entering its fifth month of a drought that has been particularly punishing in the northern reaches of the rainforest, in the region around the city of Manaus. The Rio Negro, a northern Amazon tributary, fell to the lowest levels in its recorded history last month. Wildfires have advanced where waterways have retreated.

“In my lifetime looking at drought impacts and fires, I’ve never seen so many wildfires happening so close to Manaus, a region that was not considered that flammable — or flammable at all — in the past,” said Paulo Brando, an associate professor at the Yale School of the Environment. The effects of the drought are rippling through the forest. Travel and commerce along the river system have slowed to a crawl. Brazil shut down its fourth-biggest hydroelectric plant. Riverside cities and towns are rationing drinking water. Key fish species have struggled to spawn, threatening local food supplies, and endangered pink dolphins have washed up dead on the riverbanks.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=&w=1440&impolicy=high_res
The Rio Negro, pictured Oct. 28, fell to the lowest water levels in its recorded history last month. (Andre Coelho/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

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This year’s disaster follows damaging droughts in 2005, 2010, 2015, 2016 and 2020. Each successive blow — combined with ongoing deforestation and rising temperatures — chips away at the Amazon’s ability to bounce back and puts it closer to a tipping point at which parts of the rainforest could permanently transform into a savanna. “The forest might be recovering from one drought and then get hit by another while it’s still recovering,” said Chris Boulton, a research fellow at the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute and lead author of a 2022 study on Amazonian tipping points. “If that happens, it can take even longer to get back to normal, and eventually it reaches a point where it can’t get back to normality.”

A degraded Amazon would have big consequences for the world’s climate. The ancient forest stores 123 billion metric tons of carbon — more than three times as much as humans emitted last year — and its intact western region pulls millions of tons of carbon out of the atmosphere each year. But wildfires and deforestation have turned the eastern fringe of the forest into a net carbon emitter. The rest of the forest could face the same fate. “The global impact of that is very, very, very risky,” said Carlos Nobre, an earth system scientist at the University of São Paulo’s Institute of Advanced Studies. “When the forest is losing more carbon than it is absorbing from the atmosphere, that shows we’re on the edge of this tipping point.”

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Gift link: https://wapo.st/3R4VL7j

[hunter]

1. Drought was partly responsible for Venezuela's collapse into chaos.

Most of their electric power is hydroelectric. No water in the dams, no electricity, many suffering people.

There have been several posts here on DU extolling the virtues of Uruguay's near 100% hybrid hydro/wind electric grid, but it has similar vulnerabilities to drought. Uruguay's backup plan in case of severe drought is to import electricity from Brazil and Argentina. That's not a backup plan at all in the case of a widespread drought that affects all three nations.

Climate change is only going to get worse and the consequences of it increasingly unpredictable, so we need to be developing rapidly deployable electric power systems to keep the lights on across the globe.