Can we depend on tropical forests to cease runaway local weather change?

The world’s jungles take in a big proportion of our CO2 emissions, serving to to sluggish the tempo of human-induced world warming. However they could be reaching saturation level

By Daniel Grossman

This text was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Middle on Disaster Reporting.

A CLANK like a monk’s gong rang out because the researchers marched single file up a forested flank of the Rincón de la Vieja, an lively volcano in north-west Costa Rica. After they stopped alongside the large buttressed roots of a strangler fig tree, graduate scholar Nel Rodriguez Sepulveda of Michigan Technological College held up a small metal chamber, the supply of the sound. Katie Nelson, a fellow grad scholar, tapped her pill and a machine strapped to Rodriguez-Sepulveda’s again started to buzz, noisily sucking air from the metal chamber by means of a hose. After a couple of minutes, Nelson glanced at her display. “It’s elevated!” she whooped.

I had joined the scientists on a hunt for a infamous fuel that seeps imperceptibly from fissures within the volcanic bedrock. They’d come to map the locations the place it’s extra extremely concentrated within the air than regular, in preparation for an experiment that might lastly resolve a thriller with profound penalties for the destiny of our planet: whether or not tropical forests will proceed to absorb giant quantities of carbon dioxide, crucially slowing the tempo of local weather change.

We have now at all times assumed as a lot. However more and more we aren’t so positive, elevating the prospect that world warming might unexpectedly speed up. Now the …