With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

SEESAW ACROSS THE OCEAN
How the Sahara Desert greens the Amazon
Two of the world's largest and most fragile ecosystems face each other across
the Atlantic. On one side is the Amazon rainforest; on the other the Sahara.
They seem to be ecological opposites, and unconnected. The Sahara is
rainless and largely empty of vegetation. The Amazon is one of the wettest
places on Earth, and certainly the most biologically diverse, with perhaps
half of the world's species beneath its canopy. But these two opposites are
not so far apart. For one thing, the physical gap is surprisingly small. The
Atlantic is narrow near the equator, and the two ecosystems are less than
half as far apart as London and New York. For another, many believe they
have a surprising symbiosis. Their fates may be intertwined in a rather
unexpected way—and one that could have important consequences in the
coming decades.
The key to the symbiosis lies in the remote heart of the Sahara, a region
called Bodele, in northern Chad. Few people go here. It is littered with
unexploded bombs and land mines left behind during Libya's invasion of
Chad in the 1980s. And it is by far the dustiest place on Earth. Satellite
images show year-round dust storms raging across Bodele and entering the
atmospheric circulation. According to Richard Washington, of Oxford