The bespectacled 61-year-old, who needs motion-sickness pills before each flight, has watched those flasks tell a steadily worsening story over the past decade.īrazilian atmospheric chemist Luciana Gatti has been tracking how much carbon the Amazon emits and absorbs, watching for signs of a looming nightmare. When not in her lab outside Sao Paulo, Gatti can be found training bush pilots to collect her samples, by diving in a downward spiral from 14,500 feet, sucking up little flasks of air. Plummeting rainfall would cause its trees to die off en masse, releasing up to a decade’s worth of worldwide carbon emissions back into the atmosphere - and dooming our efforts to hold global warming somewhere near a livable limit. Gatti, who works at Brazil’s national space agency, has been tracking how much carbon the region emits and absorbs, watching for signs of a looming nightmare: that the destruction could push the Amazon to a “tipping point” where much of the rainforest dries up and turns to savanna.Ĭlimate scientists say passing that point would be catastrophic: instead of helping curb climate change, the Amazon would suddenly accelerate it.

Home to more than 3 million species, the rainforest bursts with lush vegetation, which absorbs huge amounts of carbon through photosynthesis - a key fact as humankind struggles to stop heating the planet with greenhouse gases.Īs carbon dioxide emissions have surged by 50% in 60 years, to nearly 40 billion tons worldwide, the Amazon has absorbed a large amount of that pollution - nearly 2 billion tons a year, until recently.īut humans have also spent the past half-century tearing down and burning whole swathes of the Amazon to make way for cattle ranches and farmland.

Splashed across South America in an exuberant blob of deep green, the Amazon basin is one of the world’s great wildernesses, a place where life teems in the heat of the tropics, fed by the myriad rivers criss-crossing the jungle like blue blood vessels.

But the same bleak conclusion keeps popping up on her screen: the Amazon, the world’s biggest rainforest - the “lungs of the Earth,” the “green ocean,” the thing humanity is counting on to inhale our pollution and save us from the mess we’ve made of the planet - is now emitting more carbon than it absorbs.

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