This short documentary compiles satellite-tracked evidence for Brazilian Amazon rainforest destruction between 1985 and 2018.
How do you map and quantify the Amazonian deforestation? The data recorded by the Landsat has revealed the stark rate of the Amazon deforestation in great detail. The Amazon is the largest rainforest in the world. It covers an area roughly equal to that of the continental United States. In a time series spanning over three decades, starting the year of 1985, we can observe the drastic loss of rainforest cover in the Brazilian Amazon.
The Landsat archive, allows accurate identification of large scale deforestation for each year. Here, in this animation, over three decades of land use data for the entire Northern half of Brazil is shown. Since the beginning of the Landsat program in 1972, the deforested area in the Amazon has reached equivalent to the size of the state of California. As the deforestation around the town of Novo Progresso shows, the north south corridor of this region has changed considerably over time, following a characteristic herring bone pattern. Now, climate scientists can pinpoint to the specific periods of intensifications in deforestation.
Fires in 2019 sparked multiple campaigns to pressure Brazil to stop intentional fires, deliberately started during the dry season.
In four spatially separated provinces of Brazil, beginning from 1985, the deforestation activity appears to follow a planned template, with recognizable human-generated fish bone shaped clearings. Over three decades, Ji-Paraná has lost 14.7 thousand hectares of humid primary forest, making up a shocking 51% of its total tree cover loss.
The construction of the Balbina Dam inside the Uatumãh Biological Reserve in 1985, has led to the flooding of an area as large as 2,360-square-kilometres. or 910 square miles. The Balbina Dam has led to a number of ecological problems. For instance, the amount of methane released from its vast reservoir, generates ten times more greenhouse gases than a coal plant. Therefore, the dam is the least efficient in Brazil in terms of the area flooded for each megawatt generated. Moreover, the Waimiri Atroari Indigenous Territory has lost huge areas by flooding.
The documentary Damocracy explores effects of large scale dam construction projects on local people in Brazil and Turkey.
The Amazon is a self-sustaining system. The forest generates more than 80 percent of its rain by itself through intense evapotranspiration capacity of the tropical trees by sucking the water through their roots and releasing it as water vapor into the atmosphere. Tree loss leads to less evaporation and decreased rainfall. Drop in the rainfall amount will prolong the dry season further reducing the humidity. Decrease in humidity will intensify fires and reduce tree regeneration. However many tropical ecologists are worried that if a tipping point is reached, the rainforest may shift rapidly into a drier savanna state. It is suspected that tipping point may be reached when deforestation surpasses 20 percent of the Amazon. The world’s largest rainforest has already been deforested by 17 percent. Shift from tropical rainforest into dry savanna state may interfere with other global processes leading to a cascade of irreversible climatic disruptions.
The initial symptoms of the vegetational change is being observed on the fringes of the areas that have been cleared. Significant portions of these degraded forests are acting as carbon sources rather than sinks.
Royalty free music “Taiko instinct” by https://www.bensound.com/royalty-free-music
Narrations generated by IBM Watson’s AI – Artificial neural network text to speech voice synthesizer
Video sources NASA Scientific Visualization Studio. Amazon deforestation trends.
You can learn more about Landsat and the data products involved in generation of this compilation by the following mini-series:
Landsat 9: part 1, Getting Off The Ground
Landsat 9: part 2, Designing For The Future
Landsat 9, part 3: More Than Just A Pretty Picture
Landsat 9, part 4: Plays Well With Others
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