The Bodélé depression: a single spot in the Sahara that provides most of the mineral dust to the Amazon forest
By Ilan Koren, Yoram J. Kaufman, R. Washington, M. Todd, Yinon Rudich, J. Martins, Daniel Rosenfeld. 2006
354 citations recorded by the source corpus.
About 40 million tons of dust are transported annually from the Sahara to the Amazon basin. Saharan dust has been proposed to be the main mineral source that fertilizes the Amazon basin, generating a dependence of the health and productivity of the rain forest on dust supply from the Sahara. Here we show that about half of the annual dust supply to the Amazon basin is emitted from a single source: the Bodélé depression located northeast of Lake Chad, approximately 0.5% of the size of the Amazon or 0.2% of the Sahara. Placed in a narrow path between two mountain chains that direct and accelerate the surface winds over the depression, the Bodélé emits dust on 40% of the winter days, averaging more than 0.7 million tons of dust per day.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Earth-Surface Processes, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f94d470ebfab5c814117e513dae4756d6303da82
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Atmospheric Science
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Global change effects on humid tropical forests: Evidence for biogeochemical and biodiversity shifts at an ecosystem scale (2016, background): “Also, long-distance transport of dust with P-rich minerals has been shown to support plant growth in some tropical forests on highly weathered soils, such as wind inputs of dust to the Amazon from the Sahara and to the Pacific islands from Asia [Chadwick et al., 2009; Koren et al., 2006].”