Science Alert reports:

A new study of the Amazon rainforest has found the region is shifting toward a ‘hypertropical’ state as droughts become longer, hotter, and more frequent.

These conditions have “no current analogue” according to the international team of researchers behind the study. Trees are becoming exposed to whole new levels of stress, and the Amazon’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide is being reduced, too.

So drastic are the contemporary and impending changes, based on data gathered across the Amazon over more than three decades, that the researchers coined a new descriptor: ‘hypertropical’. We’re talking about conditions that haven’t previously existed on Earth for millions of years.

The researchers looked at how trees, and the soil they’re rooted in, respond to periods of high temperatures and drought. As these periods intensify, they offer a brief window into what could be the new normal within the next 100 years.

“When these hot droughts occur, that’s the climate that we associate with a hypertropical forest, because it’s beyond the boundary of what we consider to be tropical forest now,” says geographer Jeff Chambers, from the University of California, Berkeley. [Continue reading…]