The sweat of the forest: It creates a river that flows over us.

Video: TED - Ideas Worth Spreading

Translation: TED Open Translation. Review: Leonardo Silva

Internationally renowned Brazilian scientist Antonio Donato Nobre investigates the natural systems of the Amazon. His work illustrates the beautiful and immense complexity of this region, as well as its fragility in the face of current global climate change.

Antonio Donato Nobre sees nature as a very well-orchestrated symphony. A scientist at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and senior researcher at the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA), he studies the soil, hydrology, and biochemistry of the Amazon with the aim of increasing our knowledge about the complex integrated systems of what he calls a "geological marvel," the Amazon. Donato Nobre is particularly dedicated to understanding the interactions between the forest and the atmosphere, and how "the sweat of the forest," the transpiration of the trees, forms a gigantic current that carries moisture to other regions of South America and the world. His study "The Climatic Future of the Amazon" synthesizes what is known today about the delicate ecological balance in that region, and the great risk we run of losing it completely.

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Full translation of Antônio Donato Nobre's TED talk:

What do you think? [For] those who saw Sir Ken's memorable TED talk, I'm a typical example of what he describes: "A body carrying a head." A university professor, right? And you might think it's cowardly to put me on to talk about science after those first two presentations. I can't move my body to the rhythm. And after a scientist who became a philosopher, I had to talk about pure science. It could be a very dry topic, and yet I feel blessed. Never in my career—and my career has been a long one—have I had the opportunity to begin a lecture with such inspiration as this one. 

Normally, talking about science is like exercising in arid land. However, I was fortunate enough to be invited here to talk about water. And "water" and "arid" don't go together, right? Even better, talking about water in the Amazon, which is a splendid cradle of life, right? Fresh. So, that's what inspired me. That's why I'm here, even though I'm barely carrying my head around, I'm here trying, I will try, to transmit this inspiration. I hope the story inspires you, that you multiply it. 

We know there's controversy – the Amazon is the lungs of the world, right? – because of its power to massively exchange vital gases – the forest with the atmosphere. We also hear about it being a treasure trove of biodiversity. Although many believe this, few know it. If you go out here, into this flooded forest, you'll be amazed by... You can hardly see the animals. The indigenous people say: "In the forest, there are more eyes than leaves." And it's true, and I'll try to show you something.

Today, I've brought a different approach here, one that, inspired by these two initiatives—one harmonic and the other philosophical—I'll try to present an approach that is somewhat materialistic, but also attempts to convey that there is an extraordinary philosophy and harmony in nature. There won't be music in my presentation, but I hope you'll see the music of reality that I'll show you. I'll talk about physiology—not just the lungs, but other analogies with human physiology and, mainly, the heart. We begin... by thinking that water is like blood. Circulation in our body carries fresh blood, which nourishes and sustains, and brings back used blood to be renewed. In the Amazon, very similar things occur. And we begin by talking about the power of all these processes.

This is a moving image of rainfall. And what you're seeing there is the years passing by every second. Rainfall all over the world. And what do you see? That the equatorial region, in general, and the Amazon in particular, is enormously important to the world's climate. It's a powerful engine. There's a frenetic activity here in relation to evaporation. If we look at another image, which shows the flows of water vapor, what's black there is dry air, what's gray is humid air, and what's white are clouds. You see an extraordinary resurgence in the Amazon. What phenomenon—if it's not a desert, what phenomenon causes water to gush from the ground into the atmosphere with such power that we see it from space? What phenomenon is this? It could be a geyser. A geyser is groundwater heated by the heat of magma, which explodes into the atmosphere, transferring this water to the atmosphere. We don't have geysers in the Amazon, unless I'm mistaken. I don't know if anyone knows of any. But we have something that does the same job, but with much more elegance: our friendly and beneficial trees, which, like geysers, manage to transmit an enormous amount of water from the soil to the atmosphere. 

There are 600 billion trees in the Amazon, 600 billion geysers. And this with extraordinary sophistication. They don't need the heat of magma. They use sunlight to carry out this process. So, on a typical sunny day in the Amazon, a large tree can produce up to a thousand liters of water through transpiration. A thousand liters. If you take the entire Amazon, which is a very large area, and add up all this water that is being transpired—it's the sweat of the forest—you arrive at an extraordinary number: 20 billion tons of water. You know—that's in one day. Do you know how much that is? The Amazon River, the largest river on Earth, a fifth of all the fresh water that leaves the continents worldwide and reaches the oceans, discharges 17 billion tons of water per day into the Atlantic Ocean. This river of vapor, which comes out of the forest and goes into the atmosphere, is larger than the Amazon River. Just so you have an idea. If we could take a really big kettle, one of those plug-in electric kettles, and put all those 20 billion tons of water inside, how much electricity would you need to evaporate that water? Does anyone have any idea? A really big kettle. A giant's kettle, right? 50 Itaipus. Itaipu, for those who don't know, is still the largest hydroelectric dam in the world, and it's a source of Brazilian pride because it supplies more than 30% of the energy consumed in Brazil. And the Amazon is right here, doing this for free. It's a powerful and vibrant powerhouse of environmental services.

Connecting to this topic, we're going to talk about what I call the "paradox of luck," which is a curiosity. If you look at a world map—it's easy to see this—you see that in the equatorial zone, you have the forests, and the deserts are organized at 30 degrees north latitude and 30 degrees south latitude, aligned. Look there, in the southern hemisphere, the Atacama, the Namibian desert, and the Kalahari in Africa, the Australian desert. In the northern hemisphere, the Sahara, Sonora, etc. And there's an exception, and it's a curiosity: it's the quadrilateral that goes from Cuiabá to Buenos Aires, from São Paulo to the Andes. This quadrilateral was supposed to be a desert. It's on the desert line. Why isn't it? That's why I call it the "paradox of luck." 

What is different about South America? If we can use the analogy of blood circulation in the body and of blood with the circulation of water in the landscape, we see in the rivers that they are veins, they drain the landscape, they drain the fabric of nature. And where are the arteries? Any guesses? What leads... How does the water manage to irrigate the tissues of nature and bring everything back through the rivers? There is a new type of river, which originates in the blue ocean, flows through the green ocean—not only does it flow, but it is pumped by the green ocean—and whose mouth is our land. Our entire economy, that quadrilateral, 70% of South America's GDP comes from that region. It depends on this river. And this river flows, invisibly, above us. We are floating here on this floating platform, on one of the largest rivers on Earth, the Rio Negro. It's somewhat dry, somewhat turbulent, but we are floating here, and above us there is an invisible river flowing. And this river, it pulsates. And here is its pulse. That's why we also talk about the heart. You see the seasons there. It rains at one time... In the Amazon, we used to have two seasons, the wet season and the wetter season. Now we have the dry season. And you see it there, lapping at this region that should, otherwise, be a desert, but isn't.

We scientists... You see, I'm having trouble moving my head from one side to the other here. Scientists study how it works, why, etc., and these studies are generating a series of absolutely extraordinary discoveries that bring us awareness of the richness, complexity, and wonder that we have, the symphony that we have in this functioning. One of them is: how does rain form? Above the Amazon, there's clean air, just like above the ocean. The blue ocean has clean air and forms very few clouds; it hardly rains. In the green ocean, the clean air is the same, and it forms a lot of rain. What happens here that's different? The forest emits smells, and these smells are condensation nuclei, which form droplets in the atmosphere, and then clouds form that rain torrentially. The sprinkler of the Garden of Eden. This relationship between a living entity, which is the forest, and a non-living entity, which is the atmosphere, is virtuous in the Amazon, because the forest provides water and seeds, the atmosphere forms rain and returns it, thus ensuring the survival of the forest. 

There are other factors as well. We've talked a little about the heart, and now let's talk about another function: the liver! When humid air, high humidity, and radiation combine with these organic compounds, which I call "Exogenous Vitamin C," generous gaseous vitamin C, the plants release antioxidants that react with pollutants. You can rest assured that you are breathing the purest air on Earth here in the Amazon, because the plants are taking care of this characteristic as well. And this favors the proper functioning of the plants themselves, another virtuous cycle.

Speaking of fractals and their relation to our functioning, we see other comparisons. Like in the upper airways of the lungs, the air in the Amazon is cleaned of excess dust. The air we breathe is cleaned of dust by the respiratory tract. This prevents excess dust from harming the rain. When there are fires in the Amazon, the smoke stops the rain, the forest dries out, and the fire spreads. There's another fractal analogy. Like in veins and arteries, you have a return of rainwater back into the atmosphere. Like in endocrine glands and hormones, you have those gases, which I explained to you, that form, as if they were hormones released into the atmosphere, promoting the formation of rain. Like the liver and kidneys, as I just mentioned: the cleaning of the air. And finally, like a heart: the pumping of water that comes from outside, from the ocean, into the forest.

We're calling this "The Biotic Moisture Pump." It's a new theory explained in a very simple way. If you have a desert on the continent, and you have a contiguous ocean, evaporation in the ocean is greater, producing suction and pulling air from above the desert. The desert is trapped in this condition. It will always be dry. If you have the opposite condition, with a forest, evaporation, as we've shown, is much greater because of the trees, and this relationship is reversed. So, air is pulled from above the ocean, and then you have the import of moisture. This is an image taken a month ago from a satellite—Manaus is down there, we're down there—that shows this process. It's not a pretty little river, one of those that flow in a channel, but a powerful river that irrigates South America and has other purposes. This image shows, in those trajectories there, all the hurricanes that we have records of. And you can see that, in the red square, there are almost no hurricanes. This is no coincidence. This pump, which pulls moisture inland, also accelerates the air over the ocean, and this prevents hurricanes from forming. 

To conclude this section, in summary, I wanted to say something a little different. I have several colleagues who participated in the development of these theories, who are of the opinion, myself included, that we can recover planet Earth. I'm not just talking about the Amazon today. The Amazon teaches us a lesson on how primordial nature works. We didn't understand these processes before because the rest of the world is completely devastated. Here we were able to understand. So, these colleagues argue: "We can, indeed, recover other areas, including deserts." If we can establish forests in these other areas, we can reverse the climate. Including global warming. 

And I have a very dear colleague in India, named Suprabha Seshan, who has a motto. Her motto in English is: "Gardening back the biosphere." She does a wonderful job of rebuilding ecosystems. We need to do that. Having concluded this brief introduction, we arrive at the reality we are seeing out here, which is the drought, this climate change, and things we already knew. 

And here, I wanted to tell you a little story. Once, four years ago, I heard Davi Copenaua, a wise representative of the Yanomami people, reciting a text that went something like this: "Doesn't the white man know that if he cuts down the forest, the rain will stop? And if the rain stops, he won't have anything to drink or eat?" And when I heard that, I was moved to tears because I thought: "Wow! I've been studying this for 20 years, with supercomputers, dozens, thousands of scientists, and we're only starting to reach this conclusion, and he already knows!" An aggravating factor: the Yanomami have never deforested. How could they know that the rain stops? That stuck in my head, and I was completely shocked. How could he know? A few months later, I met him at another event, and I said: "Davi, how did you know that cutting down the forest stops the rain?" He said, "The spirit of the forest told us." 

And that, for me, was a game changer, right? It was a total change, because I thought: "Wow! So, why am I doing all this science to reach a conclusion that he already knows?" And then something absolutely critical hit me, which is... "what the eyes don't see, the heart doesn't feel." "Out of sight, out of mind," right? And that's a need that my predecessor put forward, that we need to see things—we, when I say we, I mean Western society that is becoming global, civilized—we need to see. If we don't see, we don't register. 

We live in ignorance. So, I make the following proposal: Let's—of course, astronomers won't like it—but let's turn the Hubble telescope upside down. And let's make the Hubble look this way. Not to the far reaches of the universe. The far reaches of the universe are marvelous, but now we have a practical reality, which is: we live in an unknown cosmos, and we are ignorant. We are mocking this marvelous cosmos that gives us a home and shelter. Talk to an astrophysicist: Earth is a statistical improbability. The stability and comfort that we enjoy, with all the droughts of the Rio Negro, with all the heat and cold, typhoons, etc., there is nothing like it in the universe, nothing known. So, let's turn the Hubble this way and look at the Earth. Let's start with the Amazon! Let's take a dive, let's get to the reality in which we live daily, and look at it very closely, since we need to. David Copenaua doesn't need to. He already has something that I think I've lost. I was raised on television, you know. I think I've lost that something, which is an ancestral record, an appreciation for what I don't know, what I haven't seen. He doesn't need the proof of Saint Thomas. He believes with veneration and reverence in what his ancestors taught him, and the spirits. Since we can't do it ourselves, then let's look to the forest. 

But even when we're there with Hubble, looking at the sky—this is a bird's-eye view, right?—even when that happens, we see something we don't know. The Spanish called it the Green Hell. If you go out here, into this woods, and get lost, and you happen to go west, it's 900km to reach Colombia. Another thousand to get somewhere. So, you can understand why they called it the Green Hell. But go look at what's in there. It's a living carpet. Each color there is a species of tree. Each tree, each canopy, has up to 10 species of insects inside it, not to mention the millions of species of fungi, bacteria, etc. All invisible. All a cosmos stranger to us than the distant galaxies, billions of light-years from Earth, that Hubble shows us every day in the newspapers. And I conclude my presentation -- I only have a few seconds -- by showing this marvelous creature, which when we see it -- the morpho butterfly -- in the forest, gives us the feeling that someone forgot to close the gates of paradise and this creature escaped from there, because it is so beautiful. 

But I can't finish without showing a technological side. We have the arrogance of technology. We have dispossessed the nature of its technology. A robotic hand is technological, my hand is biological; and we no longer think about the subject. So, let's look at the morpho butterfly, which is an example of an invisible technological competence of life, which is at the heart of our possibility of survival on the planet, and let's zoom in on it. Again, Hubble there. Let's go inside the butterfly's wing. And these scholars tried to explain: why is it blue? And let's zoom in there. And what you see is that the architecture of the invisible puts the best architects in the world to shame. All this on a very small scale. Besides beauty and functionality, there is another aspect.

Everything in nature that is organized into extraordinary structures has a function. And that function, of the morpho butterfly—it's not blue, it doesn't have blue pigment. It has photonic crystals on its surface—according to those who studied this—extremely sophisticated crystals. Nothing like what our technology had at the time. Now, Hitachi has already made a monitor display that uses this technology, and it's used in fiber optics for transmission... Janine Benyus, who has been here several times, talks about this: biomimicry. And my time is up. So I'll conclude with what underlies this capacity, this competence of biodiversity, to produce all those marvelous services: the living cell. It's a structure of a few microns, which is an internal marvel. There are TED talks about this, I won't go into detail, but everyone in this room, including me, has 100 trillion of these micromachines in their body, so that you can appreciate this well-being. Imagine what's in the Amazon Rainforest. 100 trillion. That's more than the number of stars in the sky. And we're not even aware of it. Thank you very much. (Applause)