Antonio Donato Nobre:

The magic of the Amazon: A river that fows invisibly all around us
What do you guys think? For those who watched Sir Ken's
memorable TED Talk, I am a typical example of what he
describes as "the body as a form of transport for the head," a
university professor. You might think it was not fair that I've been
lined up to speak after these frst two talks to speak about
science. I can't move my body to the beat, and after a scientist
who became a philosopher, I have to talk about hard science. It
could be a very dry subject. Yet, I feel honored. Never in my
career, and it's been a long career, have I had the opportunity to
start a talk feeling so inspired, like this one. Usually, talking about
science is like exercising in a dry place. However, I've had the
pleasure of being invited to come here to talk about water. The
words "water" and "dry" do not match, right? It is even better to
talk about water in the Amazon, which is the splendid cradle of
life. Fresh life. So this is what inspired me.That's why I'm here,
although I'm carrying my head over here. I am trying, or will try to
convey this inspiration. I hope this story will inspire you and that
you'll spread the word. We know that there is controversy. The
Amazon is the "lung of the world,"because of its massive power to
have vital gases exchanged between the forest and the
atmosphere. We also hear about the storehouse of
biodiversity. While many believe it, few know it. If you go out there,
in this marsh, you'll be amazed at the You can barely see the
animals. The Indians say, "The forest has more eyes than
leaves." That is true, and I will try to show you something. But
today, I'm going to use a diferent approach, one that is inspired
by these two initiatives here, a harmonic one and a philosophical
one. I'll try to use an approach that's slightly materialistic, but it
also attempts to convey that, in nature, there is extraordinary
philosophy and harmony.There'll be no music in my
presentation, but I hope you'll all notice the music of the reality I'm
going to show you. I'm going to talk about physiology not about
lungs,but other analogies with human physiology, especially the
heart. We'll start by thinking that water is like blood. The
circulation in our body distributes fresh blood, which feeds,
nurtures and supports us, and brings the used blood back to be
renewed. In the Amazon, things happen similarly. We'll start by
talking about the power of all these processes. This is an image of
rain in motion. What you see there is the years passing in
seconds. Rains all over the world. What do you see? The
equatorial region, in general, and the Amazon specifcally, is
extremely important for the world's climate.It's a powerful
engine. There is a frantic evaporation taking place here. If we take
a look at this other image, which shows the water vapor fow, you
have dry air in black, moist air in gray, and clouds in white. What
you see there is an extraordinary resurgence in the
Amazon. What phenomenon if it's not a desert, what
phenomenon makes water gush from the ground into the
atmosphere with such power that it can be seen from
space? What phenomenon is this? It could be a geyser. A geyser
is underground water heated by magma, exploding into the
atmosphere and transferring this water into the
atmosphere. There are no geysers in the Amazon, unless I am
wrong. I don't know of any. But we have something that plays the
same role, with much more elegance though: the trees, our good
old friendsthat, like geysers, can transfer an enormous amount of
water from the ground into the atmosphere. There are 600 billion
trees in the Amazon forest, 600 billion geysers. That is done with
an extraordinary sophistication. They don't need the heat of
magma. They use sunlight to do this process. So, in a typical
sunny day in the Amazon, a big tree manages to transfer 1,000
liters of water through its transpiration 1,000 liters. If we take all
the Amazon, which is a very large area, and add it up to all that
water that is released by transpiration, which is the sweat of the
forest, we'll get to an incredible number: 20 billion metric tons of
water. In one day. Do you know how much that is?The Amazon
River, the largest river on Earth, one ffth of all the fresh water that
leaves the continents of the whole world and ends up in the
oceans, dumps 17 billion metric tons of water a day in the Atlantic
Ocean. This river of vapor that comes up from the forest and goes
into the atmosphere is greater than the Amazon River. Just to give
you an idea. If we could take a gigantic kettle, the kind you could
plug into a power socket, an electric one, and put those 20 billion
metric tons of water in it, how much power would you need to
have this water evaporated? Any idea? A really big kettle. A
gigantic kettle, right? 50 thousand Itaipus. Itaipu is still the largest
hydroelectric plant in the world. and Brazil is very proud of
it because it provides more than 30 percent of the power that is
consumed in Brazil. And the Amazon is here, doing this for
free. It's a vivid and extremely powerful plant, providing
environmental services. Related to this subject, we are going to
talk about what I call the paradox of chance, which is curious. If
you look at the world map it's easy to see this you'll see that
there are forests in the equatorial zone, and deserts are organized
at 30 degrees north latitude,30 degrees south latitude,
aligned. Look over there, in the southern hemisphere, the
Atacama; Namibia and Kalahari in Africa; the Australian desert. In
the northern hemisphere, the Sahara, Sonoran, etc. There is an
exception, and it's curious: It's the quadrangle that ranges from
Cuiab to Buenos Aires, and from So Paulo to the Andes. This
quadrangle was supposed to be a desert. It's on the line of
deserts. Why isn't it? That's why I call it the paradox of
chance. What do we have in South America that is diferent? If we
could use the analogy of the blood circulating in our bodies, like
the water circulating in the landscape, we see that rivers are
veins, they drain the landscape, they drain the tissue of
nature. Where are the arteries? Any guess? What takes How
does water get to irrigate the tissues of nature and bring
everything back through rivers? There is a new type of
river, which originates in the blue sea,which fows through the
green ocean it not only fows, but it is also pumped by the
green ocean and then it falls on our land. All our economy, that
quadrangle, 70 percent of South America's GDP comes from that
area. It depends on this river. This river fows invisibly above
us. We are foating here on this foating hotel, on one of the
largest rivers on Earth, the Negro River. It's a bit dry and rough,
but we are foating here, and there is this invisible river running
above us. This river has a pulse. Here it is, pulsing. That's why we
also talk about the heart. You can see the diferent seasons
there. There's the rainy season. In the Amazon, we used to have
two seasons, the humid season and the even more humid
season. Now we have a dry season. You can see the river
covering that region which, otherwise, would be a desert. And it is
not.We, scientists You see that I'm struggling here to move my
head from one side to the other. Scientists study how it works,
why, etc. and these studies are generating a series of
discoveries, which are absolutely fabulous, to raise our awareness
of the wealth, the complexity, and the wonder that we have, the
symphony we have in this process. One of them is: How is rain
formed? Above the Amazon, there is clean air, as there is clean
air above the ocean. The blue sea has clean air above it and
forms pretty few clouds; there's almost no rain there. The green
ocean has the same clean air, but forms a lot of rain. What is
happening here that is diferent? The forest emits smells, and
these smells are condensation nuclei, which form drops in the
atmosphere. Then, clouds are formed and there is torrential
rain. The sprinkler of the Garden of Eden. This relation between a
living thing, which is the forest, and a nonliving thing, which is the
atmosphere, is ingenious in the Amazon, because the forest
provides water and seeds, and the atmosphere forms the rain and
gives water back, guaranteeing the forest's survival. There are
other factors as well. We've talked a little about the heart, and let's
now talk about another function: the liver! When humid air, high
humidity and radiation are combined with these organic
compounds,which I call exogenous vitamin C, generous vitamin C
in the form of gas, the plants release antioxidants which react with
pollutants. You can rest assured that you are breathing the purest
air on Earth, here in the Amazon, because the plants take care of
this characteristic as well. This benefts the very way plants
work, which is another ingenious cycle. Speaking of fractals, and
their relation with the way we work, we can establish other
comparisons. As in the upper airways of our lungs, the air in the
Amazon gets cleaned up from the excess of dust. The dust in the
air that we breathe is cleaned by our airways. This keeps the
excess of dust from afecting the rainfall.When there are fres in
the Amazon, the smoke stops the rain, it stops raining, the forest
dries up and catches fre. There is another fractal analogy. Like in
the veins and arteries, the rain water is a feedback. It returns to
the atmosphere. Like endocrinal glands and hormones, there are
those gases which I told you about before, that are formed and
released into the atmosphere, like hormones, which help in the
formation of rain. Like the liver and the kidneys, as I've said,
cleaning the air. And, fnally, like the heart: pumping water from
outside, from the sea, into the forest. We call it the biotic moisture
pump, a new theory that is explained in a very simple way. If there
is a desert in the continent with a nearby sea, evaporation's
greater on the sea, and it sucks the air above the desert. The
desert is trapped in this condition. It will always be dry. If you have
the opposite situation, a forest, the evaporation, as we showed, is
much greater, because of the trees, and this relation is
reversed. The air above the sea is sucked into the continent and
humidity is imported. This satellite image was taken one month
ago that's Manaus down there, we're down there and it
shows this process. It's not a common little river that fows into a
canal. It's a mighty river that irrigates South America, among other
things. This image shows those paths, all the hurricanes that have
been recorded. You can see that, in the red square, there hardly
are any hurricanes. That is no accident. This pump that sucks the
moisture into the continent also speeds up the air above the
sea, and this prevents hurricane formations. To close this part and
sum up, I'd like to talk about something a little diferent. I have
several colleagues who worked in the development of these
theories.They think, and so do I, that we can save planet
Earth. I'm not talking only about the Amazon. The Amazon
teaches us a lesson on how pristine nature works. We didn't
understand these processes before because the rest of the world
is messed up. We could understand it here, though. These
colleagues propose that, yes, we can save other areas, including
deserts. If we could establish forests in those other areas, we can
reverse climate change, including global warming. I have a dear
colleague in India, whose name is Suprabha Seshan, and she
has a motto. Her motto is, "Gardening back the
biosphere," "Reajardinando a biosfera" in Portuguese. She does a
wonderful job rebuilding ecosystems. We need to do this. Having
closed this quick introduction, we see the reality that we have out
here, which is drought, this climate change, things that we already
knew. I'd like to tell you a short story. Once, about four years
ago, I attended a declamation, of a text by Davi Kopenawa, a wise
representative of the Yanomami people, and it went more or less
like this: "Doesn't the white man know that, if he destroys the
forest, there will be no more rain? And that, if there's no more
rain, there'll be nothing to drink, or to eat?" I heard that, and my
eyes welled up and I went, "Oh, my! I've been studying this for 20
years, with a super computer, dozens, thousands of
scientists, and we are starting to get to this conclusion, which he
already knows!" A critical point is the Yanomami have never
deforested. How could they know the rain would end? This
bugged me and I was befuddled. How could he know that? Some
months later, I met him at another event and said, "Davi, how did
you know that if the forest was destroyed, there'd be no more
rain?" He replied: "The spirit of the forest told us." For me, this
was a game changer, a radical change. I said, "Gosh! Why am I
doing all this science to get to a conclusion that he already
knows?" Then, something absolutely critical hit me, which
is, seeing is believing. Out of sight, out of mind. This is a need the
previous speaker pointed out:We need to see things I mean,
we, Western society, which is becoming global, civilized we
need to see. If we don't see, we don't register the information. We
live in ignorance. So, I propose the following of course, the
astronomers wouldn't like the idea but let's turn the Hubble
telescope upside down. And let's make it look down here, rather
than to the far reaches of the universe. The universe is
wonderful,but we have a practical reality, which is we live in an
unknown cosmos, and we're ignorant about it. We're trampling on
this wonderful cosmos that shelters us and houses us. Talk to any
astrophysicist. The Earth is a statistical improbability. The stability
and comfort that we enjoy, despite the droughts of the Negro
River, and all the heat and cold and typhoons, etc., there is
nothing like it in the universe, that we know of. Then, let's turn
Hubble in our direction, and let's look at the Earth. Let's start with
the Amazon! Let's dive, let's reach out the reality we live in every
day, and look carefully at it, since that's what we need. Davi
Kopenawa doesn't need this. He has something already that I
think I missed. I was educated by television. I think that I missed
this, an ancestral record, a valuation of what I don't know, what I
haven't seen. He is not a doubting Thomas. He believes, with
veneration and reverence, in what his ancestors and the spirits
taught him. We can't do it, so let's look into the forest. Even with
Hubble up there this is a bird's-eye view, right? Even when this
happens, we also see something that we don't know. The Spanish
called it the green inferno. If you go out there into the bushes and
get lost, and, let's say, if you head west, it's 900 kilometers to
Colombia, and another 1,000 to somewhere else. So, you can
fgure out why they called it the green inferno. But go and look at
what is in there.It is a live carpet. Each color you see is a tree
species. Each tree, each tree top, has up to 10,000 species of
insects in it, let alone the millions of species of fungi, bacteria,
etc. All invisible. All of it is an even stranger cosmos to us than the
galaxies billions of light years away from the Earth, which Hubble
brings to our newspapers everyday. I'm going to end my talk here
I have a few seconds left by showing you this wonderful
being. When we see the morpho butterfy in the forest, we feel like
someone's left open the door to heaven, and this creature
escaped from there, because it's so beautiful. However, I cannot
fnish without showing you a tech side.We are tech-arrogant. We
deprive nature of its technology. A robotic hand is
technological, mine is biological, and we don't think about it
anymore. Let's then look at the morpho butterfy, an example of an
invisible technological competence of life,which is at the very
heart of our possibility of surviving on this planet, and let's zoom
in on it. Again, Hubble is there. Let's get into the butterfy's
wings. Scholars have tried to explain: Why is it blue? Let's zoom
in on it. What you see is that the architecture of the invisible
humiliates the best architects in the world. All of this on a tiny
scale. Besides its beauty and functioning, there is another side to
it. In nature, all that is organized in extraordinary structures has a
function. This function of the morpho butterfy it is not blue; it
does not have blue pigments. It has photonic crystals on its
surface, according to people who studied it, which are extremely
sophisticated crystals. Our technology had nothing like that at the
time. Hitachi has now made a monitor that uses this
technology, and it is used in optical fbers to transmit Janine
Benyus, who's been here several times, talks about it:
biomimetics. My time's up. Then, I'll wrap it up with what is at the
base of this capacity, of this competence of biodiversity, producing
all these wonderful services: the living cell. It is a structure with a
few microns, which is an internal wonder. There are TED Talks
about it. I won't talk much longer, but each person in this room,
including myself, has 100 trillion of these micromachines in their
body, so that we can enjoy well-being. Imagine what is out there
in the Amazon forest:100 trillion. This is greater than the number
of stars in the sky. And we are not aware of it. Thank you so
much. (Applause)