The Amazon basin is a monumental ecosystem, the largest river in the world and its tributaries form the largest basin on the planet, and together move more than 20% of the fresh water of the entire planet. The Amazon, as we know this region of South America, is a territory that covers 8 countries, more than 7 million km², includes the best-known jungle in the world, and feeds the largest wetland system on the planet, located in Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia. , and is considered to be the ecosystem with the greatest biodiversity on the globe, the Pantanal.
But the jungle that drinks from the Amazon is the same one that ends up feeding the river and its tributaries again. The trees in this jungle alone produce almost a quarter of the planet’s oxygen, and the by-product of this respiration process is nothing more than water vapor. Each of these giants “transpire” into the atmosphere about a thousand liters of water per day. The Amazon rainforest as a whole spews about 20,000 million tons of water into the Earth’s atmosphere daily; to give a bit of context we would need almost all of the world’s electricity production to evaporate all this water. This process gives rise to a phenomenon until recently unknown to science, the reason why the Amazon can hardly ever be seen from space: a river in the sky, and not just any one, is the largest river in the world.
From the mouth of the river, in the Atlantic to the north of South America all the way to the southwest and the western part of the Andes mountain range, this river of clouds carries more than the entire Amazon system combined every day. Eventually this cloud system collides with the highest peaks of the Andean mountain range, where cold winds cause torrential rains that return to feed the Amazon river system again, and incidentally nourish the jungle floor with the silt formed by the minerals that drags from the mountains. Part of this water feeds the Pantanal and contributes to the fertility of the South American plains, but above all to that of the jungle floor, in a virtuous circle that has been in operation for more than 2 million years.
Because it is not only the water vapor produced by the respiration of billions of trees in the Amazon that causes this rain system. Not all water vapor turns into raindrops, however; For this to happen the microdroplets need something around which to gather to form a droplet as we know it. At certain times of the year this is thanks to the enormous amount of phosphorous-rich sand grains that Sahara storms carry across the Atlantic and deposit in the Amazon basin. But today we know that the trees also “tell” the clouds when to rain. In addition to water vapor, when the rains in the jungle have not been as abundant as they should be (and remember that in the Amazon it rains almost daily, at least once), studies show that trees release certain volatile organic compounds that turn out to be particularly good at forming raindrops, which in turn ensures precipitation, the rain is absorbed by the roots of the trees and the process begins again.
Unfortunately we do not know how many more years we allow the existence of this complex system of rivers, a terrestrial and an aerial one; So far we have destroyed more than 900,000 hectares of Amazon rainforest, at a rate that increases rather than decreases and that will inevitably have repercussions on the climate and on the biosphere of our planet, the layer that supports the life of all living beings, animals , plants and fungi; the layer of the atmosphere that gives its characteristic color to the blue point that at the moment we all inhabit
Engineer
A pale blue dot
He is a Computer Systems Engineer. His areas of knowledge are technologies, science and the environment.
Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx