What Effect on Global Warming?
2001 National Geographic December 13, 2001 John Roach for National Geographic News Research has shown that mature forest trees in the Amazon have gained in size over the last 20 years, but scientists aren’t sure what’s causing it. Nor do they know what affect it might have on global warming, although tropical forests in the Amazon are an important component in the global climate and water cycle. An international team of researchers has formed a partnership to try to find out some of the answers. Antonio Penta Cruz of the Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonia Peruana (IIAP) spent much of the early part of 2001 climbing hundreds of trees in the Peruvian Amazon to collect leaves for the biomass study. The issue has been a subject of intense interest since 1998, when Oliver Phillips of the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom published the results of a study showing that mature forests in the Amazon have become more massive over the last 20 years. Phillips hypothesizes that the
