Victoria Arruda

Mr. Castro
Environmental Science.
05/21/2018

Summary.

In the scientific article, “Reconstruction of the Amazon Basin Effective Moisture Availability
over the Past 14,000 Years”, a detailed explanation of the moisture history of the Amazon Basin
is explained. The authors explain that the quantity of moisture is a great way to comprehend the
diversity and possible methane sources of the rain forest. Various geological epochs are
compared, some like the Younger Dryas and Holocene. Those main epochs are compared
throughout the essay by showing many aspects that led scientists to benefit from this information
and use it in other geological and environmental places. The temperature change is compared
between those times. After the Younger Dryas the effective moisture for the Amazon Basin
increase all the way to the Holocene. This change resulted in an increase in rainfall. The authors
support the fact that the history of the Amazon Basin is the largest source of atmospheric
methane and represents a large amount of the world’s tropical methane-producing wetlands.
They also highlight that the climate behaviors analyzed in their study reveal an indicative of the
rest of the Southern and Equatorial Hemisphere tropics. At the end of the text, they explain the
main sources that could contribute to the atmospheric methane variations. Those being, low-
latitude tropical wetland and peat development, high-latitude temperate wetland and pet
development, and gas hydrate release. Their records show that during the Younger Dryas epoch,
the discharge was decreased by sixty percent, causing a decrease in moisture availability and
temperature which dropped the number of methane. At the end of the same epoch a forty percent
increase happened, causing an increase in methane. Nowadays, the Amazon Basin effective
moisture is largely available. The main goal of this complex and detailed explanation of the
changes that the Amazon Basin suffered during those epochs was to show a connection between
temperature and other sources that contributes and affect the quantity of methane. The goal was
also to show how the Amazon has a major influence in other areas of the world and can be used
as a base of comparison for those other areas. All those observations concluded in the fact that
the methane record should continue to be viewed as a complex signal along with the factors that
contribute to their alterations.

Citation:

Maslin, M. A. and Stephen J. B. 2000. Reconstruction of the Amazon Basin Effective Moisture
Availability over the Past 14,000 Years. in Science. 290: 2.285-2.287.