The Amazon Fires, From an Extraterrestrial Perspective

A version of this first appeared as the TIME Space newsletter sent on Aug. 30. Space is aspirational. Merely the act of looking through a telescope is an exercise in questing. It’s vast, exciting, and gorgeous out there. Even scenes of cataclysm—a supernova, a Jovian cyclone—can be beautiful from so safe a remove as Earth. Orbiting telescopes like Hubble or Spitzer or Kepler also have the luxury of avoiding the sometimes-dispiriting business of looking down at Earth. Never has that seemed like more of a good idea than this summer, when, to look back at the surface of the planet rolling by below is to look at a hellscape—with wildfires in western Africa, Siberia, and especially the Amazon, where the massive, living, breathing rainforest has been put to the torch. The numbers are hideous: more than 57,500 fires have been set in the Brazilian portion of the Amazon in 2019; nearly 7,200 sq. mi. (18,700 sq. km.) of forest are currently burning, larger than the combined area of Connecticut and Rhode Island; another 2,800 sq. mi. (7,250 sq. km) or so have been put to the torch in neighboring Bolivia. And all of these blazes endanger the nearly 1 million indigenous people spread across 305 tribes who call the rainforest home. It is, by now, a shopworn metaphor to call the Amazon the lungs of the planet, but it is no less true for the familiarity. The jungle provides only 6% of the planet’s oxygen, which is an important but not critical share. More impo...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Environment Space Source Type: news