Splashed across South America in an exuberant blob of deep green, the Amazon basin is one of the world's great wildernesses, a place where life teems in the heat of the tropics, fed by the myriad rivers criss-crossing the jungle like blue blood vessels. Holed up in her lab, Brazilian atmospheric chemist Luciana Gatti crunches her numbers again and again, thinking there is a mistake.īut the same bleak conclusion keeps popping up on her screen: the Amazon, the world's biggest rainforest - the 'lungs of the Earth,' the 'green ocean,' the thing humanity is counting on to inhale our pollution and save us from the mess we've made of the planet - is now emitting more carbon than it absorbs. SAO FELIX DO XINGU (BRAZIL) - Something is wrong.
Humans have spent the past half-century tearing down and burning whole swathes of the Amazon to make way for cattle ranches and farmland - like here in a deforested area in Para state, northern Brazil
