This posting appeared in Discover’s annual condition of science difficulty as “Forest Islands Amid a Grassland Sea.” Guidance our science journalism by getting a subscriber.
Every single spring, rains and snowmelt swamp vast grasslands that stretch concerning the Andes Mountains and Amazon rainforest in northern Bolivia. But thousands of tree-protected mounds stand reliable, quite a few ft above the flooded grasses.
“They are like islands in a sea of savannah,” says Umberto Lombardo of the University of Bern, Switzerland. In 2006, Lombardo very first stepped on to a forest island in this Llanos de Moxos location, puzzling about how these functions could type normally. “As a geographer, I experienced absolutely no rationalization for them,” he remembers.
One particular idea suggested that about the previous number of centuries, ranchers experienced carved away lush rainforest to create pastures, but still left scattered groves of about three hundred trees each and every.