Eneas Salati

person · earth · Brazil

The Brazilian scientist who led the isotope hydrology work that established Amazonian moisture recycling as a measured quantity rather than a hypothesis. The insight behind the 1979 study is elegant and worth stating plainly. Water evaporating from the ocean and water transpired by plants carry different ratios of heavy to light isotopes, and rain progressively depletes an air mass of its heavier isotopes as it moves inland. If Atlantic vapour were the only source, the isotopic signature of Amazonian rainfall would become steadily lighter with distance from the coast along a predictable curve. It does not. The departure from that curve is the quantitative fingerprint of water that has been through a tree, and its size is the recycled fraction. Everything in this Journey about flying rivers and dieback thresholds descends from that measurement.