Shortly
after construction was completed, the Transamazonian near Altimira
Brazil, stretches through virgin rainforest.
A satellite
view of the same area a few years later reveals an advancing
wave of deforestation. Lots are parceled out to farmers along
perpendicular access roads.
This
once forested Madagascar landscape lies in ruins, unfit for
man or beast. Similar scenes have appeared in dozens of other
countries as Rainforest destruction exposes fragile soil to
erosion.
A field
biologist is dwarfed in the buttress folds of a giant kapok
tree (Ceiba pentandra) in Peru. Such trees contribute to the
grandeur and mystique of virgin tropical forests, but most of
the trees in these forests are comparatively slender.
In the mist of dawn a giant kapok (Ceibaa pentandra) spreads massive
limbs over dozens of lesser trees in this Peruvian floodplain
forest
An aerial view of an Amazonian whitewater river meandering through
its broad floodplain.
South America's
Amazon basin is obscured by smoke from the clearing and burning
of tropical forest....The smoke cloud observed during this mission
was the largest and densest yet seen by astronauts. If placed
over the United States, it would have covered an area of the
country more than three times the size of Texas.
Streaks
of gray in the earth's atmosphere show the magnitude and number
of rainforest fires burning in this view over South America shown
below.
Hundreds,
if not thousands, of white streaks in the photo below indicate
the multitude of fires burning in this view over Indonesian Borneo.
The following photo shows about 250 miles of fires burning along
Mozambique's coast line.
Ground
features are almost completely obscured by smoke over the Amazon.
In
Tanzania, the burning of brush clears more land for farming.
Along
the Zambezi River Delta of East Africa, smoke and smoke plumes
can be seen from space in the photo below.
Nothing
beats the power of a good photograph. Reading about rainforest
deforestation doesn't have the same impact as a picture of native
indians walking through recently burnt rainforest.
