Smouldering Amazon sears Himalayas

Distant ecosystems intricately linked, new study establishes

Trees set ablaze in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest could contribute to melting glaciers in the Himalayas and Antarctica because distant ecosystems essential to regulating the Earth’s climate are more closely connected than previously thought, new research has found.

Scientists have discovered a new atmospheric pathway that originates in the Amazon, runs along the South Atlantic, then across East Africa and the Middle

East until it reaches central Asia, according to a paper published this month in Nature Climate Change. That connection, which stretches 20,000 km across the globe, means that when the Amazon warms, so does the Tibetan Plateau, whereas the more it rains in the Amazon, the less it rains in Tibet.

Cascading effect

The study is among the first to investigate the interaction between ecosystems at risk of reaching a climate tipping point “– a point of no return that would transform them irreversibly. More significantly, the newly-discovered pathway suggests that the collapse of one ecosystem could destabilise others too, leading to a cascade of tipping events across the planet.

“Tipping cascades are a risk to be taken seriously,” Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a co-author of the report, said in a statement.

Scientists are only beginning to investigate the connections between far-flung components of the planet’s climate system. That knowledge is essential to understanding the full impact of global warming.

Deforestation in the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest and home to a quarter of land species, reached its fastest pace in at least 15 years last year.