Deforestation In The Amazon Rainforest Essay

Words: 866
Pages: 4

With an estimate of about 10 million types of plants and animals, the amazon rainforest is the largest in the world, and creates about 20% of the world's oxygen. In the Amazon, around 17% of the forest has been lost in the last 50 years, mostly due to forest destruction for cattle ranching ( ). The more trees that are cut down, the less oxygen will be produced and more carbon dioxide will remain in the atmosphere. The Amazon Basin stores approximately 100 billion metric tons of carbon, more than 10 times the annual global emissions from fossil fuels ( ). As the trees get cut down, the carbon emissions are given off and pollute the atmosphere and contribute to a rise in global temperatures. As global temperatures increase, the ice …show more content…
“Deforestation can alter local and regional climates because evaporation of water from leaves makes up as much as two-thirds of the rain that falls in some forests. Without trees to hold back surface runoff and block wind, available moisture is drained away quickly and winds dry the soil, sometimes resulting in desert-like conditions” ( ). As desert conditions begin to form, the world’s water table is throw off and the ecosystem is altered; leaving many the environment a wasteland and inhabitable. The scariest part about the effects of deforestation is the rate at which it occurs, “Some 46-58 thousand square miles of forest are lost each year—equivalent to 48 football fields every minute” ( ). At this rate of deforestation, it is possible to run out of forest within the next century, unless it is stopped. As forests are destroyed at an alarming rate, ecosystems are badly hurt and so is the lands habitability, causing the endangerment and extinction of many organisms. As referenced before, the loss of all of the trees would result in a very high carbon concentration in the atmosphere, causing global temperatures to rise which would result in massive flooding of the continents. The governments of all countries must put a limit on these activities before the biosphere is destroyed beyond