Today in Astonishment: The Amazon Rainforest Gets Half Its Nutrients From a Single, Tiny Spot in the

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/today-in-astonishment-the-amazon-rainforest-gets-half-its-nutrients-from-a-single-tiny-spot-in-the-sahara/260655/

***SNIP

"This depression is a unique dust source due to its location at a bottle neck of two large magmatic formations that serves as a `wind lens', guiding and focusing the surface winds to the Bodélé," the authors, an international team of geologists, wrote.

This is what that looks like.




But now let's zoom out. The dust storms that come swirling out of the Sahara can cover an area larger than the United States. That's the only scale that could deliver 40 million tons of dust from Africa to the Amazonian basin each year.

[Raster]

1. It is truly amazing just how much of a living symbiotic system our planet truly is. Earth is....

...such a wondrous, marvelous place.

[kurtzapril4]

2. It also delivers other stuff...

Insects, pollen, and mercury from open pit mercury mines.

[eppur_se_muova]

3. A reminder that eventually everyone is downwind, and downstream, from everything ...

which is why the environment is inherently socialized, globally, and pollution control must be as well.

(Yes, GHGs count as pollution.)

[nikto]

4. The Earth...

...It's ALIVE!

[NickB79]

5. So much for greening the Sahara as a geoengineering countermeasure to global warming

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2009/09/14-02.html

Forest the Sahara and you kill the Amazon.

[Sirveri]

6. We hit +3C over 1790 baseline and the Amazon will die off anyways.

[Odin2005]

7. The Sahara was grassland 7,000 years ago.

The Amazon existed back them.

[NickB79]

8. According to the refuge theory, it only existed in pockets for quite a long period of time

http://rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/

The Ice Ages caused tropical rainforest around the world to retreat. Although debated, it is believed that much of the Amazon reverted to savanna and montane forest (see chapter 3-Ice Ages and Glaciation). Savanna divided patches of rainforest into "islands" and separated existing species for periods long enough to allow genetic differentiation (a similar rainforest retreat took place in Africa. Delta core samples suggest that even the mighty Congo watershed was void of rainforest at this time). When the ice ages ended, the forest was again joined and the species that were once one had diverged significantly enough to be constitute designation as separate species, adding to the tremendous diversity of the region. About 6000 years ago, sea levels rose about 130 meters, once again causing the river to be inundated like a long, giant freshwater lake.