The Amazon Fire This And Next Time
Not so long ago it was thought that Amazonian forests and other tropical rainforest regions were completely immune to fires, thanks to the high moisture content of the undergrowth beneath the protection of the canopy tree cover. But the severe droughts of 1997-98, 2005, 2010, and currently a large number of wildfires across northern Brazil have forever changed this perception.These severe ‘mega-droughts’ in the Amazon were most likely driven by interacting large-scale climatic events, with the warming of the Atlantic increasingly outweighing the drying effects of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events in the Pacific.
