If you think trees in the rainforest are pretty tall, a new tower being built in the Amazon to monitor climate change will make them look tiny. The Amazon Tall Tower is a joint effort between Brazil and Germany to determine just how much carbon dioxide actually passes through the greenery of the Amazon Rainforest – a vast carbon sink and vastly important place at the heart of climate change on Earth. According to Gizmodo, the tower will be about 1,000 feet high – which is higher than the Eiffel Tower – and it will help scientists measure how much CO2 the rainforest absorbs or releases each year.
The tower will be tricked out with all manner of gadgets and instruments that will gather data on both greenhouse gasses and aerosol, and its rather insane height will allow it to investigate the alteration and movement of air masses through the forest over a distance of several hundred miles, according to the BBC. “The measurement point is widely without direct human influence, and therefore ideal to investigate the meaning of the forest region for the chemistry and physics of the atmosphere,” said project coordinator, Jurgen Kesselmeier as quoted on the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz website.
The tower is located about 100 miles from the Amazon city of Manaus, although it will be made of steel transported from the South of Brazil, thousands of miles away. It’s a welcome addition to the country’s tools for measuring climate data according to Brazilian project coordinator, Paulo Artaxo of the University of Sao Paulo. “The tower will help us answer innumerable questions related to global climate change,” Artaxo told the BBC.
Via Gizmodo, BBC
Images via Max Planck Institute and ciat, Flickr Creative Commons
