Pantanal fires wreak devastation, kill animals and issue weather warnings | Nature

A team of veterinarians, biologists and local guides arrived in late August to traverse the bumpy dirt road known as the Transpantaneira Highway trying to save the injured animals.

Jaguars roam the scorched earth hungry and thirsty, their legs burned and their lungs blackened by smoke. They also report crocodile bodies with jaws frozen in silent screams, the last act of desperate creatures before being consumed by flames.

This is one of thousands of fires raging across the Brazilian Pantanal, the world’s largest floodplain area, this year, in which climate scientists fear it will become a new normal, repeating other instances of increased fires. caused by from California to Australia.

The Pantanal is smaller and less known than the Amazon rainforest, but the normally abundant waters and the region’s strategic location, between the jungle, vast fields of Brazil, and dry forests of Paraguay, make it an attraction for animals.

The fires now threaten one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet, biologists say. The Pantanal is home to approximately 1,200 species of vertebrate animals, including 36 in danger of extinction. Throughout this generally lush 150,000-square-kilometer landscape, rare birds fly and the world’s densest jaguar population roams.

Fire is nothing new in the region. For decades, farmers used flames to cheaply return nutrients to the soil and renew pastures for beef cattle. But these flames, fueled by the drought, now burn with historic force, sweeping through the withered vegetation. The largest fires in the Pantanal this year represent four times the size of the largest fire in the Amazon rainforest, NASA satellites show.

As of September 6, a record 23,490 square kilometers were burned, almost 16% of the Brazilian Pantanal, according to an analysis by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Last month, Reuters witnessed a fire that swept from a forest to a pasture near the Poconé tourist portal in Mato Grosso state. The soil temperature rose to 46.5ºC.

Dorvalino Conceição Camargo, a 56-year-old farmer with a straw hat common among local workers, helped contain the flames.

Sweating from the effort, Camargo said he had never seen such a strong fire.

“It suffers everything,” he said, explaining that “cattle are suffering, (but) it is not just cattle, they suffer everything.”

The Pantanal is known to be wet, not dry. The world’s largest floodplain usually fills with water during the rainy season, from November to April of each year.

Camargo remembers navigating the waters as a child in canoes. Back at the farm where he works, he showed the farm’s watermark, 70 centimeters from the ground, carved into the post of a cattle pen. Even in a dry year, it’s usually about half, he said.

This year, the floods did not come. Only a little water has collected in a nearby ditch, he said.

Now, with the evaporation of water in the dry season, the The Paraguay River, which crosses the Pantanal, reached its lowest point since 1973According to Julia Arieira, a climate researcher at the Federal University of Espírito Santo.

Experts attribute the drought to the warming of the Atlantic Ocean, just above the equator, which is removing moisture from South America and sending it north, likely in the form of stronger hurricanes.

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NASA scientist Doug Morton said this phenomenon is caused by changes in ocean temperature known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Ocean’s equivalent to El Niño in the Pacific. Unlike El Niño, which normally occurs every 2-7 years, the Oscillation alternates between hot and cold approximately every 30-40 years.

When it warms, as it has since the 1990s, the tropical North Atlantic is more likely to warm, contributing to South America’s droughts and fires.

Changes in ocean temperatures are “a likely factor in the drought conditions we’ve seen so far this year in the Pantanal,” according to Morton, who heads NASA’s biospheric science lab.

Morton said the warm phase could also be contributing to drier weather in the southern part of the Amazon, where fires are likely to hit the highest number in 10 years in August, and in the wetlands of Argentina, where flames are the worst since 2009.

Even more worrying, Morton fears that global warming could disrupt the oscillation and leave it permanently in the hot phase, contributing to more fires.

In the government of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil also weakened the application of environmental law.

The environment ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Environment Minister Ricardo Salles visited the Pantanal in August and said federal environmental agencies sent five planes and additional personnel to assist the more than 100 state firefighters fighting the flames.

No human was killed in the Pantanal fires, according to Mato Grosso state Lt. Col. Jean Oliveira, who has led all government agencies in responding to the fire.

The victims, he said, are wild animals.

Although there is no exact count, at least thousands of animals died, according to biologist Rogério Rossi, from the Federal University of Mato Grosso.

The mobile veterinary team can save only a small fraction of injured animals. Many of these creatures are difficult to catch, they are far from accessible paths.

Veterinarian Jorge Salomão Jr. made an inventory of the butcher shop.

“We saw a lot of dead animals, mainly reptiles, snakes, alligators,” he said. “We saw a lot of dead deer, dead tapirs, dead monkeys, dead coatis.”

In the 1,347-square-kilometer burned area near the city of Poconé (MT), dead snakes are seen every few meters.

Local guide Eduarda Fernandes, who works with the rescue team, walked through the area with her feet sunk in the soot.

He caught a petrified fire snake that had bitten into his own body. One biologist said it was likely an involuntary reaction, with the animal looking for some way to escape the pain of being burned alive.

When asked what he thought happened, Fernandes replied, “Pain. Despair.”

Videos: Fires in the Pantanal