KNOCK KNOCK: Unprecedented Drought in Amazon

FROM A Record Amazon Drought, and Fear of Wider Ills
By LARRY ROHTER FOR New York Times

MANAQUIRI, Brazil - The Amazon River basin, the world's largest rain forest, is grappling with a devastating drought that in some areas is the worst since record keeping began a century ago. It has evaporated whole lagoons and kindled forest fires, killed off fish and crops, stranded boats and the villagers who travel by them, brought disease and wreaked economic havoc.

In mid-October, the governor of Amazonas State, Eduardo Braga, decreed a "state of public calamity," which remains in effect as the drought's impact on the economy, public health and food and fuel supplies deepens. But other Brazilian states have also been severely affected, as have Amazon regions in neighboring countries like Peru, Bolivia and Colombia.

"There have been years before in which we've had a deficit of rainfall, but we've never experienced drops in the water levels of rivers like those we have seen in 2005," said Everaldo Souza, a meteorologist at the Amazon Protection System, a Brazilian government agency in Manaus, the nine-state region's main city. "It has truly been without precedent, and it looks like it is only going to be December or January, if then, that things return to normal."

Scientists say the drought is most likely a result of the same rise in water temperatures in the tropical Atlantic Ocean that unleashed Hurricane Katrina. They also worry that if global warming is involved, as some of them suspect, it may be the beginning of a new era of more severe and frequent droughts in the region that accounts for nearly a quarter of the world's fresh water.
"The Amazon is a kind of canary-in-a-coal-mine situation," said Daniel C. Nepstad, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts and the Amazon Institute of Ecological Research in Belém.

"We have no idea of the game we have played into by running this worldwide experiment of pumping so much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere," Mr. Nepstad said. Even more than in other parts of the world, people who live in the world's largest rain forest depend on water for transportation, food, sewage removal - in short, just about everything, so the drought has touched nearly every aspect of their lives.

"I am very frightened," said Jair Souto, the mayor of a sleepy market town, Manaquiri, that started seeing signs of drought in September. "One thing goes wrong, and the entire system follows."

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