From CBS:

“For 55 million years the Amazon rainforest has weathered all of nature's ups and downs, but just one century of human negligence — a geological blink of an eye — threatens to be the nail in the coffin for this ancient forest.

“When Lovejoy started studying the Amazon in the 1960s, 10 million people lived there and the forest was 97% intact. Now there are 30 million people living there and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is at 20% — the critical level at which scientists believe the Amazon starts to tip towards the point of no return, where it no longer survives as a lush wet rainforest and transitions into an arid savanna.

“Lovejoy says this transition from rainforest to savanna could happen as fast as a mortgage cycle. "I would say it's a matter of something that happens on the timescale of decades like 10, 20, 30 years, not centuries. So, a lot of the people alive today would actually get to see that negative consequence."

What is a rainforest, anyway?

“A rainforest is only a rainforest because it is a rain-making machine — generating 50% of its own rainfall. That phenomenon is made possible as the leaves that make up the canopy of trees exhale moisture upward (a process called evapotranspiration), condensing in the cooler air above and forming a river of clouds that rains the moisture back down. 

"Just by watching what happens after a rainfall in the Amazon and afterwards you see plumes of moisture coming up out of the canopy of the forest and that all moves westward to become rainfall once again, " explains Lovejoy. 

“But as the trees disappear and the forest becomes fractured, so does the moisture. Lovejoy says this destruction is due to fires and deforestation from small landowners grabbing land and to large corporations engaged in industrial agriculture, mainly growing soybeans and supporting livestock.”

Plenty more on the Amazon, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and the Gulf Stream right here in the article.

Good luck!

[Cover photo: CBS]