Amazon Basin Tree Rings Hold a Record of the Region’s Rainfall

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By Rachel Fritts, Eos/AGU. 

Excerpt: The Amazon basin contains the world’s largest rain forest, famous for its rich biodiversity and importance in the world’s oxygen and carbon cycles. It also has an outsized influence on water cycles in South America and beyond. Understanding how climate change is affecting Amazon hydrology is thus a key priority for climate researchers. However, modern measurements of the region’s annual rainfall don’t provide the historical context needed to explain a recent uptick in wet season precipitation. Baker et al. use more than 200 years of oxygen isotope data from tree rings as a window into the region’s hydrological past. Oxygen isotopes can serve as a proxy for historic rainfall amounts because heavier isotopes are more likely to get flushed out of the atmosphere in precipitation in years of greater rainfall. That means rings formed in years with less rainfall should have a higher proportion of heavy oxygen isotopes compared to wetter years.…

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