What
makes a rainforest? Millions of things, living and dead and inanimate,
but perhaps most importantly of all, rain. Rain, obviously, comes from
clouds, and clouds come from.... fungi? Maybe so, according to an essay
in TIME based on research published recently in the journal
Science, which explores the intricate relationship between a rainforests's unique weather and the flora and fauna that rely on it.
When
you mess with the Amazon rainforest you mess with a lot of things — 2.5
million species of insects, 40,000 species of plants, 1,300 species of
birds, and those are only the known ones. The 1.4 billion of acres of
thriving, sprawling biology that cover the Amazon help drive the very
metabolism of a continent. And now it appears that the rainforest is at
least partly responsible for something else: the Amazonian clouds
themselves. Clear-cut the land and you could, in effect, clear-cut the
sky.
More about the tenuous link between land and sky, on
Time.
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