Amazon Fires Destroying Rainforest Alarming Rate, Adding To Carbon Emissions, Deforestation: NASA

The Amazon rainforest is shrinking rapidly because of forest fires, and scientists are concerned, NASA reported.

The Amazon has been shrinking for years due to deforestation and pollution, but now fires in the understory have burned 3% of the rainforest in the last 12 years. The forest fires are adding to the destruction what is already precarious, shrinking land.

The  slowly- creeping fires are in the understory of the Amazon, which is the world's largest tropical rainforest.

The fires are hard to measure from space, but scientists from NASA say the damage is worse than they thought.

"We've never known the regional extent or frequency of these understory fires," Doug Morton, the lead of a new study, said. The study, published by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, shows concerning levels of destruction in the rainforest.

NASA said that in the study that 1999 and 2010, understory forest fires burned more than 33,000 square miles-which amounts to roughly 3% of the forest in 12 years.

Generally, the fires are caused by humans. Cigarettes, cooking, and burning waste can start them. But they're not the massive forest fires related to deforestation-rather, they are small fires, burning slowly in the understory.

Dryness and low nighttime humidity add to the risk. The flames in understory fires are only a few feet high and often burn for weeks at a time.

Deforestation is still very concerning, but understory fires are a new concern for carbon emissions also. Morton said they're an "important source of [carbon] emissions that we need to consider."

Some of the highest years of deforestation in the Amazon had low understory fire rates.

The scientists from NASA conducted the study by using satellite imaging from the dry season collected by MODIS,  the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instrument on NASA's Terra satellite. They compared damage and recovery in many areas over several years.

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