globalization

Saharan Dust And The Amazon | Earth Wise

October 23, 2020 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

We talk about globalization primarily in the context of how human activities connect up distant parts of the world. But there are natural processes that are global in scope as well. One of these is the transportation of mineral-rich dust from the Sahara Desert in North Africa to the Amazon Basin in South America.

Every year, this dust is lifted into the atmosphere by winds and carried on a 5,000-mile journey across the North Atlantic. It turns out that this dust plays a critical role in the Amazon basin ecosystem. The Amazon Basin in turn plays a major role in global climate. Its trees and plants remove huge quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stores the carbon in vegetation.

The transcontinental journey of dust is important because of what is in the dust. The dust picked up from ancient lake beds in Chad comes from rock minerals formed by dead microorganisms and is loaded with phosphorus. Phosphorus is an essential nutrient for plant growth and is in short supply in Amazonian soils. Local nutrients like phosphorus in the Amazon mostly come from fallen, decomposing leaves and organic matter but tend to be washed away by rainfall into streams and rivers.

Studies have shown that the phosphorus that reaches Amazon soils from Saharan dust is essential to replace the amounts lost to rain and flooding.

Recent research has found that the quantities of dust transported to South America are inversely linked to rainfall in North Africa and is likely to be affected by climate change. Changes in dust transport could affect plant growth in the Amazon and the amount of CO₂ removed from the atmosphere. The forces that affect the climate are truly global in nature.

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Web Links

Study quantifies Saharan dust reaching Amazon

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

What Is An Endangered Species? | Earth Wise

March 3, 2020 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Biodiversity is declining rapidly throughout the world and people are mostly the reason. Species are disappearing because of changes in land and sea use, the direct exploitation of organisms, climate change, pollution, and invasive alien species resulting from globalization. The challenges of conserving the world’s species are many and difficult. Among these challenges are determining which species are endangered and how and when to protect them.

What constitutes an endangered species is not necessarily obvious.

Extinction risk increases as a species is driven to extinction from portions of its natural range. Most mammal species have already been driven to extinction from half or more of their historic ranges because of human activities.

According to a recent survey of ordinary Americans, three-quarters of participants said that a species deserves special protections if it had been driven to extinction from any more than 30% of its historic range. This compares with the language of the U.S. Endangered Species Act that defines an endangered species as one that is “in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range.”

Experts and decision-makers are more accepting of risks and losses because they believe greater protection would be impossibly expensive. Decision-makers tend to be influenced by special interest groups with a vested interest in not instituting protections.

Before human activities began elevating extinction risk, a typical vertebrate species would have experienced an extinction risk of 1% over a 10,000-year period. Current policies consider a 5% risk over 100 years to be acceptable. Policies consider whether we can afford to protect species. Given the dangers of declining biodiversity, we should ask whether we can afford not to.

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Web Links

What Is An Endangered Species?

Photo, posted July 29, 2018, courtesy of Sergio Boscaino via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Endangered Language Species

January 14, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

There are approximately 7,000 languages spoken in the world today but only about half of them are expected to survive this century. There are many factors contributing to the decline in languages. Perhaps the most significant is globalization, which pushes countries and individuals to shift to national or international languages for economic reasons. Other factors include the lack of support for regional languages in educational systems and mass media, persecution of minority linguistic groups by governments, and disruption of communities during war and emigration.

Predicting which languages will survive and which won’t is difficult. A potential tipping point for languages is the same one affecting the survival of species: climate change. Many small linguistic communities are located on islands and coastlines that are vulnerable to hurricanes and rising sea levels. Other communities live in places where increases in temperatures and erratic rainfall threaten traditional farming and fishing economies.

These climate-related changes will force communities to relocate,creating climate change refugees. Dispersing these people will lead to the splintering of linguistic communities and the need for the use of other languages. Such changes will place additional pressures on languages that are already struggling to survive.

There are endangered languages in many places around the world. Some are exotic such as the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, which is home to dozens of distinct languages spoken by no more than a few thousand people. Others are much closer to home, such as in indigenous communities in Canada.

The rich tapestry of human language is just another of many things threatened by the changing climate.

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Web Links

The Conversation: The impact of climate change on language loss

Photo, posted May 19, 2009, courtesy of Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.