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Posts Tagged ‘Amazon’

Drought Causes Amazon Rainforest Trees to ‘Inhale’ Less Carbon from the Atmosphere

March 6, 2015 Comments off

scienceworldreport.com

Catherine GriffinAmazon Rainforest
For the first time ever, scientists have discovered direct evidence of the rate at which individual trees in the Amazon rainforest “inhale” carbon from the atmosphere during a severe drought. (Photo : Flickr/Mark Goble)

For the first time ever, scientists have discovered direct evidence of the rate at which individual trees in the Amazon rainforest “inhale” carbon from the atmosphere during a severe drought. The findings could be huge when it comes to calculating how much these forests contribute to carbon capture and storage in the future.

Scientists have long suspected that drought influences how much carbon trees manage to capture and store. The extent of that influence has long remained a mystery-until now. Scientists measured the growth and photosynthesis rates of trees at 13 rainforest plots across Brazil, Peru and Bolivia, comparing plots that were affected by the strong drought of 2010 with unaffected plots.

Each of the plots contained between 400 to 500 trees. In addition, the rainforest plots that were chosen were

Read more…

Categories: Rainforest Tags: , , , , ,

Rainforest in Transition: Is the Amazon Transforming before Our Eyes?

January 20, 2012 1 comment

scientificamerican.com

amazon-pasture RAINFOREST TO PASTURE: Deforestation, among other human impacts such as climate change, are having a rainforest-wide impact on the Amazon. Image: Courtesy of Compton Tucker, NASA GSFC

The Amazon rainforest is in flux, thanks to agricultural expansion and climate change. In other words, humans have “become important agents of disturbance in the Amazon Basin,” as an international consortium of scientists wrote in a review of the state of the science on the world’s largest rainforest published in Nature on January 19. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) The dry season is growing longer in areas where humans have been clearing the trees—as has water discharge from Amazon River tributaries in those regions. Multiyear and more frequent severe droughts, like those in 2005 and 2010, are killing trees that humans don’t cut down as well as increasing the risks of more common fires (both man-made and otherwise).

The trees are also growing fast—faster than expected for a “mature” rainforest—according to a network of measurements.

The exact cause or causes of this accelerated growth—which means the Amazon’s 5 million square kilometers of trees are now Read more…

Categories: Brazil Tags: , ,

FBI seizes servers in brute force raid

June 22, 2011 1 comment

tgdaily

The FBI seized a number of web servers during a recent data center raid in Reston, Virginia – a facility used by the Swiss-based hosting company Digital One.

The operation knocked several web sites offline, including those run by New York publisher Curbed Network.

FBI seizes servers in brute force raid“This problem is caused by the FBI, not our company. In the night FBI [took] 3 enclosures with equipment plugged into them, possibly including your server — we cannot check it,” DigitalOne CEO Sergej Ostroumow confirmed in an official email to clients.

“After [the] FBI’s unprofessional ‘work’ we can not restart our own servers, that’s why our Web site is offline and support doesn’t work.”

Unsurprisingly, the raid has been tentatively linked to an ongoing investigation of Lulz Security.

Indeed, an unnamed government official told the New York Times the FBI was “actively investigating” LulzSec  along with suspected “affiliated” hackers.

While most Americans probably don’t really care about a few downed sites, the brute force raid executed by the Feds surely doesn’t bode well for the future.

One can’t help but wonder what comes next: mass Gmail seizures, Amazon cloud server confiscations, or perhaps entire data centers carted off in FBI trucks?

Clearly, U.S. law enforcement officials must learn how to minimize “collateral damage” to neutral civilian infrastructure during cyber-related raids. 

If they don’t, such operations could potentially be as disruptive as those executed by hostile digital infiltrators.

Rather ironic, don’t you think?

Categories: FBI, internet Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Drought In Amazon Could Lead To Accelerated Global Warming

March 30, 2011 Comments off

ibtimes.com

A new study reveals a drought last year in the Amazon basin caused the forest to lose significant levels of vegetation, which in turn could accelerate the pace of global warming.

The study, conducted by an international team of scientists and funded by NASA, uses specific satellite imaging data provided by the agency to draw its conclusions. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellites provided more than a decade’s worth of data for scientists who studied the de-vegetation of the Amazon rainforest.

(Photo: NASA/BU) NASA satellite sensors, such as MODIS, showed an average pattern of greenness of vegetation on South America: Amazon forests which have very high leaf area are shown in red and purple colors, the adjacent cerrado (savannas) which have lower leaf area are shown in shades of green, and the coastal deserts are shown in yellow colors.

 

The scientists say changing climates with warmer temperatures and altered rainfall could lead to the rainforests turning into grasslands or woody savannas. This causes carbon stored in the rotting wood to be released into the atmosphere, which would add to the greenhouse gases present.

“The greenness levels of Amazonian vegetation — a measure of its health — decreased dramatically over an area more than three and one-half times the size of Texas and did not recover to normal levels, even after the drought ended in late October 2010,” Liang Xu, the study’s lead author from Boston University, said in a statement.

“The MODIS vegetation greenness data suggest a more widespread, severe and long-lasting impact to Amazonian vegetation than Read more…

Categories: Droughts, Global warming, South America Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Hacker group Anonymous says it will release Bank of America emails

March 13, 2011 Comments off

heraldsun.com

The loose-knit hacker collective known as “Anonymous” plans to release emails obtained from Bank of America Corp. early today, an Anonymous-related Twitter feed said.

“[S]ee you guy’s Monday Morning 5am…London Time,” a post from the Twitter username OperationLeakS said.

“Meet my demands Release Pfc. Bradley Manning and I will remove every #BoA Employee from the Emails,” the feed said Saturday, referring to the US Army private accused of leaking sensitive US cables to WikiLeaks.

Manning is currently being held at the Quantico Marine base, outside Washington, D.C.

Anonymous is not officially affiliated with WikiLeaks, but members have previously targeted websites including PayPal, Amazon, Visa and the head office of the Swedish Prosecution Authority for hampering WikiLeaks’ activities.

WikiLeaks said in December 2010 that it would soon release information about banks and advised “that all people who love freedom close out their accounts at Bank of America,” prompting speculation that the bank would be the next target of a major WikiLeaks document dump.

Categories: Banks, wikileaks Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

CO2 Fears After Amazon Rainforest Droughts

February 6, 2011 1 comment

Two severe Amazon droughts have sparked fears that the rainforest’s ability to absorb carbon emissions is being diminished – and, worse still, it may soon release almost as much CO2 as the US.

A rare drought in 2005 – billed as a once-in-a-hundred-years event – was then followed by another drought in 2010 that may have been even worse, according to a study by a team of British and Brazilians scientists in the journal Science.

With a huge number of trees dying as a result of the droughts, the scientists predict that the Amazon will not be able to absorb as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as usual in future.

This would remove an important global buffer against pollution.

Even worse, rotting trees may release into the atmosphere as much as five billion tons of C02 in the coming years.

That would be almost as much as the 5.4 billion tons emitted from fossil fuel use by the US in 2009.

Based on the impact of the dry spell on tree deaths in 2005, the team projected that Read more…

Categories: Droughts, South America Tags: , , , , , , ,