Amazon Basin

Assembled from 23 blocks · 3 evidence · 25 related

1. Story
2. The drainage basin of the Amazon River and the largest continuous tropical forest on Earth, conventionally given as around 6.9 million square kilometres of catchment across eight sovereign states - Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guyana and Suriname - plus French Guiana. Brazil holds roughly six-tenths of it and Peru roughly an eighth. Its scale is not the interesting fact about it; its self-sufficiency is. Rain arriving from the tropical Atlantic would exhaust itself within a few hundred kilometres of the coast if the land simply shed it to the sea. Instead the forest returns most of what lands on it to the atmosphere through transpiration, and the easterly trade winds carry that returned water further inland to fall again. The basin is therefore not a passive recipient of rainfall but a participant in producing it. Its tree flora is estimated at roughly sixteen thousand species and some 390 billion individual trees, of which a very small number of hyperdominant species account for about half of all stems.
3. Knowledge
4. Amazon Basin
5. Connections
6. Amazon River
7. Manaus
8. Moisture Recycling
9. Amazon Tall Tower Observatory (ATTO)
10. Brazil Nut Tree (Bertholletia excelsa)
11. Jaguar (Panthera onca)
12. Forest Degradation
13. Arc of Deforestation (Arco do Desmatamento)
14. BR-319 (Manaus-Porto Velho Highway)
15. The 2005 Amazon Drought
16. A drought in the southwestern basin reverses the carbon sink
17. A second severe drought follows within five years
18. Aircraft profiles show the eastern Amazon emitting more carbon than it absorbs
19. The UN climate conference convenes at the mouth of the Amazon
20. Evidence
21. Supports the estimates of total tree species richness, total stem number and the concentration of stems in a small number of hyperdominant species in the Amazon. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; the figures given in the object record are stated from the producing model's knowledge of this paper.
22. Supports the claim that a large fraction of Amazonian rainfall is water recycled by the forest, established from the isotopic composition of rainfall across the basin. V55 verification basis: this session had no WebSearch budget and the egress proxy blocked every research domain, so the paper was neither retrieved nor read; the citation and the finding are stated from the producing model's knowledge and the exact recycled fraction is deliberately not quoted.
23. Supports the claim that recognised indigenous territories cover a large share of the Amazon basin, comparable to or greater than the area under formal conservation protection. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; no percentage is quoted from this source, and a curator should take the current figure directly from RAISG rather than from this record.