Resumen de Punctuated Disequilibrium.
The article reports that occasional but extreme climate could turn parts of the Amazon rain forest into dry savannas. According to recent analyses, large parts of the Amazon rain forest, which sprawls across an area about as large as western Europe, could end up turning into dry savannas--a state from which there may be no turning back even if the climate returned to normal. This somber prediction comes out of the latest findings of the Large Scale Biosphere/Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia, the most ambitious field project ever done in a tropical ecosystem. A key factor is deforestation, which alone in the eastern Amazon could tip the ecosystem toward a drier state. Change in land use may also dry up the forest in a less straightforward way: by altering the physical properties of rain clouds.
