What would happen if the Amazon rainforest disappeared?

The Amazon rainforest is one of the most amazing places on earth. It covers 40% of South America, drives the South American economy and stores 86 billion tons of carbon. That would otherwise be polluting our atmosphere. However, about 750, 000 square kilometers of rainforest have been destroyed since 1978, all thanks to humans. If this continues, the Amazon rainforest could disappear within 100 years.

How bad would that be for our planet? Well, let's take a look. For starters, we'd be losing a huge amount of our planet's biodiversity. The Amazon rainforest has more plant and animal species than any other ecosystem on the land. If we destroy the Amazon, we will be destroying all that diversity too, and ruining an entire ecosystem at the same time.

That would have huge effects on earth. We'd all quickly realize how much we have been relying on the Amazon's resources for food and medicine. Most people are surprised when they find out that hundreds of drugs have come from things in the Amazon rainforest.

So who knows what other important treatments we could lose without the rainforest? But the most critical problem we would face if the Amazon completely disappeared would be a faster pace of climate change. If the Amazon rainforest continues to wither and die, it will stop being a source of oxygen. Some experts believe that if this happens, we would lose the battle against climate change. But it is not all doom and gloom.

There is still hope for the Amazon rainforest. Through studies conducted over the past several decades, researches have found that rainforests may be able to survive human-caused destruction even without human help. A rainforest can start growing again if it has enough seedlings. However, this can only be successful if the rainforest isn't always under attack. So what can you do to help?

Close to the North Pole, remote and rocky Plateau Mountain in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard seems an unlikely spot for any global effort to safeguard agriculture. Yet at the end of a 130-meter-long tunnel cut out of solid stone is a room filled with humanity’s most precious treasure, the largest and most diverse seed collection—more than a half-billion seeds.

With growing evidence that unchecked climate change will seriously affect food production and threaten the diversity (多样性) of crops around the world, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (地窖) represents a major step towards ensuring the preservation (贮藏) of hundreds of thousands of crop varieties. This is a seed collection, but more importantly, it is a collection of the traits (特征) found within the seeds: the genes that give one variety resistance to a particular pest and another variety tolerance for hot, dry weather.

In sealed boxes, behind multiple locked doors, monitored by electronic security systems, enveloped in below-zero temperatures, and surrounded by tons of rock, hundreds of millions of seeds are protected in their mountain fortress. Frozen in such conditions inside the mountain, seeds of most major crops will remain viable for hundreds of years, or longer. Seeds of some are capable of retaining (保留) their ability to grow for thousands of years.

Everyone can look back now and say that the Seed Vault was a good and obvious idea. But back in 2004, when the Seed Vault was proposed, it was viewed as a crazy, impractical, and expensive idea.

We knew that nothing would provide a definite guarantee. But we were tired, fed up, and frankly scared of the steady, greater losses of crop diversity. The Seed Vault was built by optimists who wanted to do something to preserve options so that humanity and its crops might be better prepared for change. If it simply resupplied seed gene banks with samples those gene banks had lost, this would repay our efforts.

The Seed Vault is about hope and commitment— about what can be done if countries come together and work cooperatively to accomplish something significant, long-lasting, and worthy of who we are and wish to be.

Tiny microbes (微生物) are at the heart of a new agricultural technique to manage harmful greenhouse gas. Scientists have discovered how microbes can be used to turn carbon dioxide into soil-enriching limestone (石灰石), with the help of a type of tree that grows in tropical areas, such as West Africa.

Researchers have found that when the Iroko tree is grown in dry, acidic soil and treated with a combination of natural fungi (霉菌) and other bacteria, not only does the tree grow well, it also produces the mineral limestone in the soil around its root.

The Iroko tree makes a mineral by combining Ca from the earth with CO₂ from the atmosphere. The bacteria then create the conditions under which this mineral turns into limestone. The discovery offers a new way to lock carbon into the soil, keeping it out of the atmosphere. In addition to storing carbon in the trees' leaves and in the form of limestone, the mineral in the soil makes it more suitable for agriculture.

The discovery could lead to reforestation projects in tropical countries, and help reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the developing world. It has already been used in West Africa and is being tested in Bolivia, Haiti and India.

The findings were made in a three-year project involving researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh, Granada, Lausanne and Delft University of Technology. The project examined several microbiological methods of locking CO₂ as limestone, and the Iroko-bacteria way showed best results. Work was funded by the European Commission under the Future&Emerging Technologies(FET)scheme.

Dr Bryne Ngwenya of the University of Edinburgh's School of GeoSciences, who led the research, said："By taking advantage of this natural limestone-producing process, we have a low-tech, safe, readily employed and easily operating way to lock carbon out of the atmosphere, while improving farming conditions in tropical countries."