[JustDoItAlways]

Those Amazon trees are sure resilient.

2 years without rain and they all survive. Most survived even the third year without rain.

Drought resistent tropical rain forest (averaging 100 inches of rain per year), who would have guessed it.

[reformedliberal]

We watched the Brokaw (IIRC) doomsday special on Discovery over the weekend. An ecologist who studies the Amazon dug down a long ways (sorry, we were so busy screaming at the TV, I missed the depth) and found that the trees in the Amazon have extremely deep roots. The ecologist still maintained that *someday* the trees could theoretically be unable to reach enough water to survive. This prediction was accompanied by aerial views of vast tracts of mature canopy forest.

I recall being told in the past that the trees in the rain forest have shallow roots due to what was claimed to be poor soils. The warning then was that the slightest upset to the rain forest ecology would cause the soils to dry up and the trees to fall over, rot, release carbon, etc.

It wasn't that long ago that research from the Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics was released that disproved the *lungs of the planet* idea by showing that the rain forest actually releases huge plumes of methane, as do fields of grain crops.

From the article:

"The evidence of direct methane emissions from plants also explains the unexpectedly high methane concentrations over tropical forests, measured only recently via satellite by a research group from the University of Heidelberg.

But why would such a seemingly obvious discovery only come about now, 20 years after hundreds of scientists around the globe started investigating the global methane cycle? "Methane could not really be created that way," says Dr. Frank Keppler. "Until now all the textbooks have said that biogenic methane can only be produced in the absence of oxygen. For that simple reason, nobody looked closely at this."

The fact is that, in order to determine the quantity of emissions, scientists indeed have to make very careful measurements. The researchers from Heidelberg conducted most of their experiments in methane-free air, in order to factor out the high natural background of methane. Furthermore they used isotope analysis to show beyond doubt that this was an undiscovered process of methane production. By "looking closely" - despite established opinion - they made a discovery that will require textbooks to have their passages about methane production rewritten."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/01/060115155754.htm

[EEDUDE]

I want to know who or what is responsible for my finding fossilized sea shells many places here in central Indiana.

Could it possibly be that there was once an ocean here?

Nature isn't static!