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The Desert that Creates the Rainforest
#1
The Desert that Creates the Rainforest
http://boingboing.net/2012/08/13/the-des...he-ra.html

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Quote:This is probably the most amazing thing I learned all weekend. The Amazon rainforest—with all its plant and animal life, and all its astounding biodiversity—could not exist as we know it without the patch of African desert pictured above.

The rainforest is amazing, but the soil it produces isn't very nutrient rich. All the minerals and nutrients that fertilize the rainforest have to come from someplace else. Specifically: Africa. Scientists have known for a while that this natural fertilizer is crossing the Atlantic in the form of dust storms, but science writer Colin Schultz ran across a 2006 paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters that not only produces evidence for a much larger trans-oceanic transfer of dust than was previously assumed ... it also pinpoints the exact (and astoundingly small) location where all the fertilizer in the Amazon is coming from.
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#2
RE: The Desert that Creates the Rainforest
I quite often get Saharan dust over my car so I can well believe it Big Grin
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#3
RE: The Desert that Creates the Rainforest
Wasn't the Sahara desert once lush futile land with a massive lion monument worshipped by a civilization pre-dating the Egyptians? ^^
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#4
RE: The Desert that Creates the Rainforest
(August 23, 2012 at 4:17 pm)Welsh cake Wrote: Wasn't the Sahara desert once lush futile land

Yes.

(August 23, 2012 at 4:17 pm)Welsh cake Wrote: with a massive lion monument worshipped by a civilization pre-dating the Egyptians? ^^

Debatable. Prevailing scholarship puts construction at ~2500BCE, some fringe theories as early as ~10500BC.
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