Stopping Illegal Mining in the Amazon with Satellite Data

Why is it that all you need to grow a healthy plant is a crack in the pavement? And you're telling me you can't grow a tree in the Amazon?

Maybe we should pave over the areas.

We should pave them over and then just put some cracks in them.

There we go.

Thank you, Chuck. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Got with me Chuck Knight. Chuck it, baby. How you doing? Hey, Neil.

What's happening?

So in this episode, we're going to explore what role space technology, satellite imagery, has in understanding what goes on on Earth's surface. In this particular case, related to mining.

Yeah.

The mining of gold in the Amazon, which involves not only The deforestation of trees, but also a poisoning of the environment from mercury that was used in the extraction of the gold. Tell me more about this episode, because you did a lot of the homework behind it.

Well, you know, it's great that you mentioned space and the connection of space to Earth. We know that there are thousands of satellites that are active right now.

Thousands.

Thanks a lot, Elon. Way to go. Way to go, baby. Most of them are yours, baby.

Way to go.

I'm winning space.

Whoever dies with the most satellites wins.

That's it.

You know, as much as we depend on them and scientists use them and governments use them, if we wanted to use those satellites effectively, they wouldn't really be accessible to us because for the most part, you're going to get a lot of information in code.

But you mentioned the Amazon, right?

Let's just say you wanted to see what was happening in the Amazon with these mines that you talked about that are indeed really deleterious to the ecology and the Amazonian ecosystem. Let's say you wanted to get a real-time picture of that Well, you know, you would be able to do that with this satellite constellation database called SkyFi.

And they're not just photos like Google Earth where there's like, you know, aerial photos. These are actual satellite imagery and the analytics that go along with it. And for this, it would be like a specific mine, like in the Yanomami indigenous territory in the Brazilian Amazon. We would be able to take a look at the actual minds, kind of like in a citizen science way.

So it's more than just photos, you're saying. There's analytics that go with it. That's an interpretation of the data that the satellite obtained.

Right.

It's not just a slideshow like on Google Earth. And there's nothing wrong with Google Earth.

Love them.

But it's not just a slideshow.

It's actual usable information that if you're interested and you want to learn something, which if you're watching StarTalk, you definitely want to learn something. that you can go in and inform yourself about what's happening in the area.

All right, so Chuck, you have examples of these images that you're talking about?

I wish I could take credit for doing it myself, but our producers at StarTalk here actually went and pulled some great images and information. Like right here, we're going to put this up. You can see the devastation from space for over a couple years in.

The Yanomami Brazilian Amazon.

So here are some images that show you the river. And then you see these white areas next to the river where- That used to have trees. Used to have trees, but those white spots now are water. If you see the river is white, the river is white because it's water. All those white spots that you see off the river, those are where mines were. And that's why they're white now because they've left these ponds, which are filled with terrible chemicals and mercury- that's the residual effect of the mining operation. And you get to see it in real time.

Here's another image. This is in the Peruvian brain forest. It's still part of the Amazon.

I'd forgotten that. That's right. I think Brazil owns the Amazon, but no, no. There's a Peruvian Amazon as well.

And these are like high-res satellite images. And the light coloring.

are the retention ponds or those little water holes that we saw in the other image that contain mercury and all kinds of chemicals. And you've got to remember that these chemicals now, they sink into the ground, they become runoff and go into the water, and once again poisoning the area, not to mention the deforestation that happens to make these clearings in the first place.

Right, so if it gets into the water supply, it gets into the fish.

Right.

It gets into the ground, it gets into the groundwater.

Right.

So it gets into your water supply and your food supply, your hose. There you go.

That's it. That's all you have.

Right. All you have. Food and water.

That's all you have is food and water, baby.

I mean, that's all she wrote.

Unless you learn how to live on the air diet. You know, if you can't live- The breatharians. If you're a breatharian.

I'm a breatharian.

That was a real movement, by the way.

Excuse me, would you mind not smoking? I'm trying to eat. I'm a breatharian. Here's another image.

The same high-res Peru images and- you can see them in even greater detail in these two images, side by side, and you can see how they change, how they've grown, and the devastation that's caused.

Now, some of these are illegal. Some might have proper permissions, but a large fraction of the gold production of Brazil comes out of illegal mines. Right, yeah. And so these satellites are basically catching them in the act.

Catching them in the act, you know?

So why don't they just shut them down?

Uh.

You know, I think we're going to have to ask the expert that.

Because I don't know. Some things are easier than other things to accomplish in this world. Because I got here, we have as a special guest, Dr. Larissa Rodriguez. Let me pronounce that right again.

I was about to say, you, my friend, are Puerto Rican, and you messed up Rodriguez?

Rodriguez, okay. Because this one has an S and not a Z. See, that's what threw me off. Yeah, the Portuguese has it. Dr. Larissa Rodriguez. Welcome to StarTalk. And did I pronounce your name properly?

You did. Hi, Neil. Hi, Chuck. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm very happy. Yeah, that's Larissa Rodriguez.

Rodriguez.

With a Portuguese accent.

I love your education background. You have a PhD in energy. Yes, that's right. From the University of Sao Paulo. It's cool that you can get a PhD in that because it is so important. Energy and civilization go hand in hand. and exploitation of energy, how you get it, where it comes from. And your expertise focuses on mining, energy, and land use at the, let me get this right, Instituto Escolhas.

What is that?

Instituto Escolhas, which is a nonprofit based here in Brazil, working with sustainability. So, and you got it right. I got my background on energy studies and I went into that because I'm very interested to know how we as a civilization goes exploring natural resources. And then from energy resources, I transitioned my studies a little bit to mining and also land use. And I'm working on that, like studying how we as humans use natural resources and how we regulate that. Wow.

And, you know, we take so much of it for granted that metal just shows up. wherever you need it, whenever you want it.

Yes.

There's a market price for it, but I don't think any of us or hardly ever say, where did this come from? Well, how did we obtain this? I don't know that people think that we can't do that.

We're American.

Like we wouldn't do that. Half the stuff we buy would, we wouldn't be able to buy.

No, our heads would explode.

Oh my God. Right.

So, so, We know, Larissa, that satellite images of the Amazon basin, basin or anywhere up and down the Amazon, you found evidence of gold mining, but so what? I mean, if you're gonna mine for something, you mine for gold, why not? Why is that so differently important in this case?

What is important these days is that we do have a big problem in Brazil. And the problem is when we look to gold, Half of the gold Brazil produces is considered to be illegal.

Half of it.

And you're talking about more or less 50 tons per year or $ 2. 5 billion per year.

It's a lot.

This is half the gold that comes out of Brazil.

Exactly.

And this gold is traveling the world because Brazil produces gold to export.

Exactly. We produce in Brazil.

And then we export, meaning that the illegal gold is trembling the world.

It's not in Brazil anymore.

And then comes to the question that we should all ask, where this gold comes from.

This gold comes.

Mainly from the Amazon region. So basically from illegal mines that have no authorization to operate whatsoever. And many of them is signed in regional territories and also in other protected areas like national parks and all that.

Is it illegal because they don't have a permit? Or is it illegal because you can't mine for gold on the native land no matter what?

Both situations, actually, because some of them, they are illegal because they don't have a permit. And some of them, like inside indigenous territories and national parks, for example, they cannot have a permit because it's not allowed to mine there, not even gold or any other minerals.

So what can you tell us about the the environmental impact, apart from it just simply being illegal.

Yes, I mean, there are very severe impacts when you talk about gold mining, especially in the Amazon, because it's the.

Most biodiverse place on Earth.

So first of the environmental impacts, what we can say, it's about deforestation, because to open up a new mining pit, you deforest the area.

And gold mining uses a lot of areas. So we are not talking.

About tunnels or underground mine. We're talking about mining being done on the surface.

So we're on the same page. Generally, when we think of a mine, we think of someplace very deep below the ground. But what you're saying is there's a whole branch of mining that's surface mining, where you need a lot of surface to put through your devices, your filterings, your machines to find something within the surface. Is that correct?

That's correct. That's exactly what it is. So we are talking about large lands or big land on the surface.

We're talking about operations that come with excavators to open a mining pit. So the first step to it is to deforest the area, to cut down all the trees. And just for you to have an idea, in the past years, deforestation in the Amazon associated only with mining.

Activities grew by five times. So they've been growing a lot.

So meaning that illegal gold mines or legal gold mines, they're growing immensely in the Amazon over the past decade. So there is a lot of deforestation related to that. And the thing is, about the illegal mining sites. They don't do land reclamation because the miners, they do not recover the area after they're done.

Well, they're illegal.

That's like your drug dealer saying, by the way, I just opened a rehab.

Exactly. They're not going to do it, you know.

Exactly. Of course they won. I mean, they are completely illegal. So they take the gold and then run. So they abandon the area. And the picture we see when you.

Go inside mining like that, it's like a dead land, completely dead land.

Right.

You can't do anything with the land afterwards. And for anybody here in America that's trying to figure out what this is like, it's the same, except it's legal here. would be mountaintop coal mining here in America, where they literally shave off the top.

Oh, strip mining.

Yeah, they shave off the top of a mountain so they can pull out the coal. And that land is now unusable.

It's just done.

At least for another billion years. So now there are no trees. And is there any chemicals that are, invoked to try to extract the gold that become like waste products?

Yes.

And the most dangerous one is mercury. So all the gold mines in the Amazon, they use mercury. They use mercury to do the amalgamation, like to separate gold from the other sediments. And they're using like with no controls, dumping to the rivers, dumping to the soil, burning and like people breathing the air with mercury.

So it's a really big problem.

So we're talking environmental problem, but also related to health problems.

The mining operations you described, the mercury gets into the environment, into the water supply, into the air. And so the mercury enters your body in these ways that are kind of cloaked in the air, in the water supply, in the food stocks. So what are the consequences of mercury poisoning?

Or the symptoms, I should say.

And you mentioned it very right, because it's like mercury has no taste. I mean, if you drink water contaminated, you don't know it. If you eat a fish contaminated, you don't know it. You don't taste it, don't feel it, you don't see it. So that's very dangerous. And also the long exposure to it. As long as a person is exposed to it, the worst would be the effects.

And the contamination levels.

And What is very well now is the neurological effects that the mercury contamination has.

So you can start with.

Simple headaches that you won't even have idea that relates to mercury contamination, but that can also affect our movements and literally our neurological system.

So it's very dangerous.

So Larissa, in reviewing the maps that we've seen from satellite imagery, there's of course the very clear and obvious ones from the Amazon, where in one image there are trees and then there's another there isn't. And it's along, you see the riverbed, you see all the telltale signs. But I've also seen images from Peru. And what were you discovering from Peru?

So what we are discovering in Peru is basically the same situation in Brazil. Of course, the structures can be a bit different. But the thing is, like, Illegal mining is increasing and we can see the expansion of these mining areas.

In the Amazon.

And basically you see that the pattern, I mean, the pattern of occupation is a bit different, but what we see, they're like small ponds of mud. That's exactly the same way that they open up the pits and they operate the mine. So it's the same pattern in terms of the little ponds, the little brown piles we.

See, So these are very large puddles of water, ponds of water.

And mud.

And this is the byproduct of the mining operation, because it takes a lot of water, I presume, correct?

And actually, this can be, yeah, two situations, actually. The byproduct, but also like once you start digging the ground, water started to spring. And then they build this pond so you can pump the water out of the mining pit and you put in a pond. And then you keep pumping water from the pond so you can dig more and more and take the gold out.

So the pond is highly contaminated, I would guess. Is that correct?

Yes, because in these areas you use mercury indiscriminately. So there's no controls whatsoever. So basically with mercury.

So Larissa, I see another image where there's a meandering river. And we have a detail of the operations on the side of that river where the forest has been removed and it's been shaved bald. And I think I see a puddle there, one of these ponds of mud. Is everything you've described, is that what I'm looking at in this image?

Yeah, that's exactly. And the third part of this image is here.

We see a river, probably already contaminated by mercury. It's inside the indigenous land. It's inside the Yanomami indigenous land, which has been under a military crisis because of the invasion of illegal miners. So we see the once pristine forest completely destroyed.

Now at this area. So it's dead land, right?

And then we also here see the ponds that I was mentioning that to open up the mining pit, miners need to pump water out of it. So they use these ponds. And normally these ponds, all the water there, it's contaminated. So it's a pretty sad picture, I would say.

Okay, so we lose the trees. We're poisoning it with chemicals, mercury in particular. And what else? What's another? If that isn't enough.

Exactly.

Is there anything else that is a consequence of this activity?

Yeah, the direct consequence, and it's also very well known, at least here in Brazil, is human rights violations.

Because when we talk about.

Illegal mining in the Amazon, we are talking about the invasion of indigenous lands. So indigenous communities that, like the world saw what happened with the Yanomami people, the humanitarian.

Crisis that we have there now, is that illegal miners come normally invading this area with violence. There is a lot of violence involved with that. And With the disturbance in.

The areas, people lose their food because they're not allowed to hunt anymore or collect fruits or also because their water is contaminated. And also they're very exposed to new diseases. So we have this very side side of the story. And also even the miners themselves, they are very vulnerable. They are working under terrible, terrible working conditions. So there is no good sign in the story of illegal mining, the Amazon, unfortunately.

So Larissa, if you are indigenous, you're probably living off the land and all the local resources that have sustained you for decades. thousands of years. And if your food sources are contaminated, basically, this is a kind of a mini genocide just for the sake of gold. Am I overstating this?

You're not.

And actually, in Brazil, we are calling it a genocide because the Yanomami people, this area where the territory is, is a very remote area in the Amazon in.

Brazil, very remote.

So they don't have access to any other resources that they want that they have in the forest.

Other than the natural ones right there.

Other than the natural ones. And they've lived there like since ever.

Yes, forever. Forever.

Forever. That's how they used to live, from the forest. And now.

They don't have food anymore because they used to hunt. And with the illegal miners inside the territory, animals are not close enough for them to hunt them. Also, there is also competition for food there now. And the water is contaminated, the fruits, all that, and also the diseases.

So why don't you just shut down the illegal mines? This sounds like a stupid, obvious question. But if they're illegal and you know they're there, verified by satellite imagery... Why doesn't the military or whatever government agency just go on in and shut them down?

Yeah, the federal police and also the environmental authority in Brazil, they both work together to crack down these operations.

And sometimes they do. In the past year, they destroyed.

Hundreds and hundreds of illegal operations in the Amazon. So they are doing now a good job on that. And it's effective because then, like burning the machinery and all that, you increase the risk for these operations. But the thing is, it's not always that the Brazil government puts resources on that. Also, the agencies, they also need more resources to do that.

So one thing that I think is important is not only to work with law enforcement, because these operations are law enforcement, but also on the demand side. Because in Brazil, you don't know, like if you buy gold, you don't know if it's legal or illegal. There's no way to attest the orange of gold. So I truly believe we should work with a traceability.

System, for example.

So people, consumers can know where the gold comes from. And then you somehow will close the door for illegal gold to enter into the market.

How much of this is just because we're primates and we like shiny things and that demand is never going to go away? Because the other side of it is you try to control the demand. And if you can't do that, maybe you will never succeed because the marketplace is stronger than your noble environmental goals.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, and what I think is crazy about gold, because basically we use gold like for three reasons.

So for industry, like for iPhones and cell.

Phones, but that's like a tiny bit of.

the gold we produce goes to the industry.

The circuitry that, yeah, it's the wire, the circuitry, yes. Yes, and it's... Gold has a very, very high transmission of electricity within it, very low resistance to electrical movement. So gold has very high value in an electronics universe. But you don't need big chunks.

Of it to make that happen. No, exactly, no.

Like, considering, like, the whole world demand for gold, like, less than 10% goes to the industry. Like the other 90%, it's more or less.

Divided half by half by jewelry. So the jewelry industry, yeah.

I got a gold wedding ring, wedding band, yeah.

But you know what?

I think it's crazy the other half goes to the banks.

It's a form of capital or currency.

It is.

I think it's kind of crazy that we still need to extract gold from underground or from soil and then you process it and then you keep into the in a bank and you do nothing with it nothing there's no use yeah.

So it's basically bankers and rappers are the problem.

Here the big gold consumers yes rappers with blank yes so you know how to how to fix all of this we just go and mine an asteroid they're asteroids that have pre-sifted all the heavy ingredients of the universe into one place. So they're iron nickel asteroids that have very high gold concentration. We just get grant lasso one of them and it'll basically put everyone else out of business overnight. So, you know, but, but then would gold be so valuable if it's so available, you see, it's out in space.

So you just, you just bring it down as slowly as possible so that, You.

Keep the value high.

Believe me, when Jeff Bezos does this, he is not going.

To bring all the gold at once.

Yeah, he's martyred on that.

So the satellite imagery enables you to locate these. So in what ways is the satellite data helping you?

It helps a lot because of course, like if you go to a specific place in the Amazon, everybody knows there is illegal gold mines there, but not in the whole region because the Amazon is huge. So it's very important to have satellite images and monitoring because in some places, like sometimes in a very pristine area, very far from where the hub of illegal miners, without the satellite images, you'll never be able to spot these places.

So it's very important.

Also like, because the federal police, like the police, the authorities in Brazil, they have access to this kind of technology as well. But me, for example, as a researcher and working for a nonprofit and trying to study the issue and develop public policies, it's important to have data like that because then I can understand the problem. We can measure the problem. We can monitor it and all that.

Without it, it would be impossible.

If you don't have data, you got nothing.

Exactly. And I mean.

And I think in Brazil, in the past year, we did achieve some advancements in terms of regulating the market only because we were able to size the problem, to show the problem and expose that. I was very invested on researching and working with the.

Data on that.

And that was only possible because of satellite image also combined with other databases. So we wouldn't be able to advance with the problem in Brazil if it wasn't for it.

All right, Larissa, thank you for being our guest on StarTalk. This is a very new material for us to cover. And we're delighted to learn about it and that we got top people like you analyzing the situation and trying to make a better world for it. So thank you.

No, thank you. It's such important to talk about it. And it's been an honor being here.

All right.

Thank you.

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Well, we're back. And Chuck.

Yes.

We needed some expertise on what effect deforestation has on the climate.

Yeah.

If we're going to be StarTalkian complete about this topic, what's going on in the Amazon. So we found Dr. Jennifer Holt. Jennifer, welcome to StarTalk.

Great.

Thank you. I'm really excited to be here. This is a big honor. Thank you.

Excellent. No, no, no, no.

It's no, just you, we, you, you honor us. I'm going to, I'm going to go with what you said, Jennifer.

You're taking it. Chuck is taking it. Chuck, is it that bad out there, Chuck? You need a gold star today, Chuck. So Jennifer, you're a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This is one of the DOE Department of Energy labs. There's several, many actually across the country. And this is one of them managed by the University of California, Berkeley. Oh, my gosh. So you specialized in the Earth climate systems modeling.

Is that right? And OK. But how about humans? How do we plan? that modeling?

Yeah, that too.

Yeah. So within the whole global Earth system, I focus a lot more on the terrestrial land component. So kind of understanding how ecosystems are being carbon sinks and carbon sources and But you're right, the human component is a very big part of that. It's the decisions we're making of land use change, land cover change, what we're doing to different forests, different grasslands management.

So yeah, the human component is also a big part of it.

On the risk that you use colloquial jargon there, when you say a carbon sink, please tell me what you mean by that.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So forests all around the world and all different vegetation, through photosynthesis, it will pull in CO2 for us. So all the CO2 that we're polluting every day in climate change, it will pull in CO2 and let out oxygen. So this is the carbon sink that will go into natural vegetation.

Nice. So it pulls in the CO2 and it keeps it.

Yeah.

It keeps it in the tree. You're not breathing the CO2 that's in the tree.

There is a flux of it.

So there is a flux that comes and goes during photosynthesis and respiration, but there is a part that stays stored and locked into the tree. So we want to try to keep that pulled in, keep that sequestered, and not try to disturb these forests where we disrupt that balance and that flux of more going out than coming in.

Do you have a special focus? Because in this episode, we're thinking about the rainforest, the tropical rainforest, of course, the preeminent among them is the one in Brazil. And we've seen some deforestation there related to mining. And so, uh, do you, do you have a focus there or is that just part of your total modeling that you care about?

Yeah, the Amazon is a big major focus, but this, um, couple of projects that I work on, you know, we do care about all tropical forests globally and pan-tropically. Um, But yeah, you're right that the Amazon basin does play a huge role in curbing the climate crisis. So there's about, give or take, 100, 150 billion tons of carbon stored in these trees. And if that was to go up and that carbon go into the atmosphere of CO2, that's about 10 years worth of all just our global humanity emissions of CO2. So So it's a big, yes, source of carbon that's stored. And it's really important to really preserve its capacity and keep sequestering this carbon and mitigate climate change.

It's been analogized as or personified as the lungs of the earth. But I don't think that's right, right? Aren't there other sources?

Look at you, gotta be a killjoy, huh?

What?

I mean, it sounds all poetic and it makes a great headline. You know, they're plowing down the lungs.

Of the earth.

But I looked at the numbers and as important as Amazon is, it's not the most important lungs of the earth. Am I right there?

Yeah, you're right.

There are definitely other, I mean, the oceans and phytoplankton and a lot of other things also produce tons of oxygen and all other, you know, kind of forest tropical systems throughout the world.

And It's funny that it is kind of called the lungs of the earth.

It's poetic.

It really should be the reverse lungs of the earth because it does absolutely the opposite of what our lungs do.

Oh, interesting.

Our lungs pull.

In oxygen and then through transference puts it into our bloodstream, pulls out the CO2 from that bloodstream.

And then we excel.

It's the opposite.

Of what lungs do. Yeah, Jennifer, what do you got to say about that?

It is. I know.

It's the exact opposite of a lung.

However, I think the message is, hey.

You like breathing, right? Breathing's good.

And, you know, this is what this is doing.

This is helping us.

You like this oxygen? This is helping us breathe. You like oxygen?

You like breathing? It's the lungs of the earth.

Exactly.

We like clean air. We like oxygen. So, yeah, so people think lungs. They think breathing. They think oxygen.

And, Forests do produce oxygen. Forests pull in CO2. You're right where lungs do the opposite of that. They pull in oxygen, let out CO2. But yeah, there's so many other ecosystem services that the Amazon provides. And I kind of like to focus on all those other ecosystem services too, instead of just.

You call them services like it's a bank or something.

Well, no.

Yeah.

It's an interesting term that people use because I think we do want to try to think of it as a commodity and something that does have a money value on it and something we should value.

You get the economists to listen to you that wouldn't otherwise care.

Believe it or not, there's an international movement of underfoot to try and pay Brazil and other countries where the Amazon is located to to not cut down trees because it is such a commodity. So it's like, why don't we commodify it? How about this? You guys don't cut down the trees, you don't deforest, we give you.

This much money.

Yeah.

And there, there's a lot surrounding that of making sure that that's done appropriately in the right way and with the right safeguards of protecting people's livelihoods.

Wait, wait, Chuck, I got a tree in my backyard. Pay me to not cut it down right now.

Here's some money.

You got to let me know what kind of tree it is.

Cause if it's a ficus, nobody gives a damn. Wait, wait.

If the Amazon is not the lungs of the planet or sort of the inverse lungs of the planet, and then we give that to the plankton and the, the phytoplankton, then what is it to us if it's not our lungs?

Yeah, exactly.

Well, it does supply a lot of oxygen, but yeah, there's lots of other ecosystem services that it does provide and services of being like just things that really do benefit us and benefit humanity that is almost invaluable to put a price on. So giving us air, making sure we have oxygen and we could breathe, but they also purify the water for us, which is very invaluable for, They help to renew soil fertility and cycle the movement of nutrients. And forests and the roots help stop erosion, landslides.

They mitigate floods and droughts. And one of the coolest things that I think is they really help to moderate extreme weather events. So with the trees intact, they could help stop storms, you know, and do windbreaks and everything. And through the shading and cycling of water that they provide, they really help stabilize our climate.

In what way does the Amazon forest mitigate drought?

So tropical forests really can act as their own local water pump, which I think is super interesting. So forests will receive a certain portion of their own water supply naturally through a recycled rain that they have made. So they could act as their own conduits of their own water pumps. And this is occurring because as storms and everything kind of comes in and trees die, hold this water in the soil and then through pumping out water through the little conduits of the trees, through the leaves, through evapotranspiration, they can then create their own clouds above them, their own rain. So they can really kind of help recycle and reuse this water. Wow.

Yeah. That's pretty intense.

Okay. So what you're saying is they have so much stored water. in their root system, in their leaf system, in their body, the physical body of the trees themselves, that they can survive a drought in ways that other vegetative regions of the world could not.

Exactly.

Is that what you mean by that?

Yeah, because they're so dense, so big, that that's just more forested, vegetated area of storing this water. And they can maintain this water recycling that kind of goes back and forth. Where if you had other ecosystems where it's smaller vegetation, you know, more of the rain that comes through is runs off or is leaked somewhere else.

And then it can't, it doesn't keep it.

It doesn't keep it as much.

Yep.

So let's get to the, the satellite images that we saw where there's a mining operation that is involves deforestation and contamination of surrounding soils and, and, and water watersheds. So is this small compared to what you normally would concern yourself with on a global scale? Would you just concern, is the trend line bad? Is that really what's going on?

It still is concerning.

Yeah. Cause we, we do look at, you know, every little piece that that's being deforested and where, um, because in kind of putting a little bit of grounding kind of on deforestation and in the Amazon is that to date about around 17 to 18% of the Amazon basin has been deforested. So that's around 100 million square kilometers.

Yeah.

And most of this, the main driver is actually cattle ranches, beef and dairy.

And then second next is mining.

So this rate and status of deportation, you know, is tricky as we track it over time because it depends a lot on human choices, human decisions, politics. And there's been trends where deportation did hit a peak around like two thousand. But then in the 2010s, there was this really large effort and a very successful effort to really curb deforestation. And in 2012, deforestation had declined almost 80% in the Brazilian Amazon, which was a huge, large feat.

And it was a great, great success.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Excuse me, Jennifer. That's a low bar to say we succeeded by having less deforestation.

It's still according.

You know, you got to. up your game there, Jennifer.

True.

We need to stop it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Don't celebrate less deforestation.

That is true. I guess I try to celebrate small wins, but you're right.

Yeah, just small wins. So the parks that have been deforested, if people gather– wise people gather and they declare that we want to regrow this back into rainforest. Can that happen? And if it can, over how much time?

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

So that's a large effort that's happening is really restoration regrowth. Um, so just quickly, in addition to, to my role at the Lawrence Berkeley national lab, I actually do work for, um, a nature tech company that's doing just this, that's trying to restore and regenerate degraded forested lands.

Um, And it could work. It could definitely happen.

But why wouldn't nature do that by itself? It did it the first time.

We need to give it a leg up a little bit now. So that's the thing is that a forest.

Nature hates us. That's why.

No, no.

It's just that I've been- Where was I? Somewhere- I was in Hawaii or somewhere else where there's a volcanic shelf off to the side. And maybe the volcano was like 80 years ago or the spillage. And there's like plants growing in the lava field, right? So nature is like, you know, I don't care if it's lava. I'm going to grow there anyway. I'm going up a driveway. There's a crack in the pavement and a mushroom is coming up through the crack. Why is it that all you need to grow a healthy plant is a crack in the pavement? And you're telling me you can't grow a tree in the Amazon basin?

Maybe we should pave over the areas. We should pave them over and then just put some cracks in them.

There we go.

Thank you, Chuck.

Problem solved.

There you go. Problem solved by Chuck.

We're all good.

Yeah.

No, that's such a great point. I mean, nature is resilient. Nature wins.

It grows and cracks. It grows after lava builds. So, yes, nature will regenerate. But we're in a time crunch with climate change. And so we want to give nature a leg up. We want to try to do assisted regeneration.

We're speeding the process. We're not really doing it. We're speeding the process.

And also there's this idea called additionality where yes, nature will regrow on its own, but we want to pull in additional carbon to make up for what we're putting in the atmosphere. So we could try to get at this net zero because we're still constantly buffering fossil fuels. And as we do that, we want to add in even more additional carbon into regrowth. So that's why we do this assisted regeneration. And also start quickly to talk about forest degradation is increasing. So there's, It's very, very different from deforestation is just, you know, the complete change of a land type where you took a forest, you completely changed it into cattle grazing, mining, urban roads. But forest degradation is just as impactful. It covers the exact

same area in the Amazon as what's being deforested. And it's harder to track. And it's more pervasive because it's these smaller scale disturbances, things like fires or logging or drought stress. So that's happening all across the Amazon and forest degradation is going up. So that's why we also want to try to recover to combat both deforestation and degradation.

All right.

So your models, you know, when I think of climate models, just coming to it as a physicist, I think of, well, there's the energy from the sun, there's the temperature gradients in the atmosphere and how. What's the inventory of energy? Where is it going? Where is it coming from? How is it coming in? How is it getting reflected back? That's what I think of.

But since you're worried about land, how many parameters are in your models? That must be huge.

Yeah, it's a lot.

And the more parameters you have, it seems to me the harder it would be to have confidence in your conclusions because there's so many knobs around. you have to turn and trust that you turn them the right way.

Jennifer responds with, that's why I'm a boss, Neil.

That's why I'm a boss because I do's it like that.

I got it. So you have all of this. And then we have the satellite data. So it seems to me you might be limited in the precision or the accuracy of your models by the kinds of data you can get from satellites that do see all the land masses of the world. So can you break down what are your knobs that you're turning in your software?

Yeah, you're right that there are a lot of parameters that go into land processes, vegetation processes, And we work on all of those.

And we really use remote sensing a lot more now to help us.

Satellite.

Yes.

Remote sensing is satellite.

Remote sensing from satellite and remote sensing from drones as well. So airborne and space.

Right here, we are remote sensing you over this satellite.

True, true, very true.

A remote sense you, you're in Berkeley over the internet. Right, so you mean satellite sensing?

Yes, satellite.

Satellite sensors, yeah, sensors that are on satellite in space. That's our kind of remote sensing that we're doing. So we could use, you know, these high resolution satellite images that are really able to show distinct changes over time. And this is useful when we look at time series analysis So you could see on the one hand on left, there's more vegetation cover. And then when you look at the image on the right, there is less vegetation cover here.

And so this is really important when we do have less and less vegetation coverage, then it just makes these larger edges and more of the just disfragmented forest creates more forest edges, which what that does is it it heats up the edge of the forest. So before like a forest canopy, it can really help with shading and cooling.

But when you have more exposed ground to radiation and to the sun, it heats up that area, which then kind of gets hotter areas into the forest. And just more of that open area will just lead for more encroachment of maybe things like fires or logging or human encroachment. So, yeah, so it's really important to be able to have these high resolution images to see where this vegetation change is occurring.

Is it expanding over time? Is it becoming less over time? And as forest ecologists, we really want to try to track that and monitor it. So when I'm talking about edge effects, that means that before we have, you know, an intact, continuous forest where over large areas of land, large area of hectares, There's forest that's all being intact.

And when it's all intact, it has its own microclimate. It's cooler underneath it. It cycles water and energy.

But when you.

Degrade forests or when there's different forest fragmentations, like we're seeing here in the images, it will create these open boundaries where there's open land next to continuous forests.

And that's that edge.

And the edge effects is a type of degradation that we see into the forest because there's change in temperature and radiation. And that edge can then lead to more degradation of that intact continuous forest. I personally like to look a lot at forest disturbance and regrowth.

That we talked about.

So I like to pay attention to things that track growth and recovery. And a lot of this is changes in forest structure. So for this, we'll use something maybe called LIDAR, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging. And LiDAR is great because it can penetrate through the forest canopy and can give us good vertical information.

Jennifer, if L stands for light and you're penetrating the forest canopy, you're not using visible light for this. Because last time I tried to look through a forest canopy, I couldn't. And my eyes use visible light. So presumably there are other frequencies of light that do have this penetration that the satellites are providing. So that sounds like a really good place to be because otherwise you're blind to what's going on on the ground surface. levels, right?

Exactly.

Yep.

You're exactly right.

Yeah.

There's these multispectral bands that we use on a lot of these different sensors that can do everything from visible light to near infrared. And yeah, and that just allows us to see a lot of different things and see a lot of really cool vegetation traits even, which I really think is interesting. So in addition to the forest structure, we could also look at other indicators that are proxies for vegetation productivity. So some things that we could detect are proxies for how plants are photosynthesizing and if they're healthy.

And yeah, so there are sensors that have these specific spectral bands that are actually associated with chlorophyll content.

So they can look at something called solar.

Induced fluorescence, which is when the leaves in the vegetation canopy will light up when plants are absorbing white light and when like photosynthetic activity is occurring.

So yeah.

Yeah, these sensors are very helpful at looking at forest structure, different traits, different variables.

So Jennifer, it's pretty clear that in a mining operation where they've removed the trees, you don't need special satellite wavelengths to see through the canopy because it's on full display anyway. Really then, your LIDAR and other sort of specialized satellites will help you get through the clouds. Because if I remember my Earth maps, rainforests have mostly cloud.

We don't put telescopes on the equator. Because it's mostly cloud cover there.

Exactly, yeah.

Is that right? So half of what you got to get through is a cloud. Before you even get to the canopy, you got to get through the cloud.

Exactly.

Yep, that's exactly true.

So that's kind of a hard challenge of making sure that we use the right near infrared band and we use, yeah, the right capability to try to get through the clouds or just repeat measurements over and over and hope for a non-cloudy day. So it is a little challenging.

No, there's so much data. When we think of, A buzz term, at least the last 10 years, has been crowdsourcing the analysis of data. And if people have access to satellite imagery, maybe they could help out if they know what to look for. Is that something you guys have considered?

Oh, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that there's so much more ways to be able to do crowdsourcing because the data is becoming more accessible, easier to use. There's better computing power. better online platforms to really being able to interrogate the data and look at the data. So, yeah, I think it's really exciting times and really be able to play with it in different ways.

That's kind of what, you know, Skyfy is all about. Oh, the Skyfy people, yeah. They try to democratize the access to data. They made it so that anybody can pretend to be Jennifer, you know?

Yeah.

No, there are no substitutes.

Do you ever take information that you see in the natural restoration after a disturbance, like a fire or something, and learn something that will help.

You assist in restoration.

Of an area that might have been degraded from something we've done?

What he's saying is what? have you done anything useful? I just translated what he said. Are you just, you're just analyzing, but not helping the situation.

That was kind.

Of a question, but I didn't mean it like that.

That was great. No, I hope so.

I mean, I'm really, really excited about new developments and new things that we're doing to fight climate change. And I am really hopeful about these new advancements. Like, For example, I'm working with a company called Cultivo that's helping to regenerate nature and restore degraded lands through this process called nature-based climate solutions. And it's great because, you know, like we mentioned, forests help us mitigate climate change by storing carbon, pulling in carbon. Trees have been doing this for centuries.

And as long as they're not under threat and as long as we keep them healthy, you know, they could keep.

Doing this over time.

And, you know, we really need to change the incentives for countries and different commodity sectors to have this large economic incentive to help restore lands and make sure these forests are durable to disturbance. And we're thinking about the livelihoods of people who live in these forests. And something that I'm super excited about is that the UN Climate Change Conference's They had this pledge to stop deforestation, which is to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030. And many Amazonian countries are really taking this seriously and doing it.

And Brazil is making great, great movements. And just a small little interesting side note that I think is interesting is the highest greenhouse gas emitting countries in the world, you know, the top four like us and China and Russia, It's burning fossil fuels in the energy sector that accounts for their biggest greenhouse gas emissions.

But in Brazil, it's different. They already use a lot of renewable energies, and their majority of climate change emissions is not from burning fossil fuels, but it's this land use change and deforestation and cattle ranching. So if we could halt deforestation by 2030, and since they already use renewable energy sector, they could really become a net zero emissions country and hit some of their targets before other people.

And this means really reducing their emissions by a lot. So, and yeah, the Amazon forest benefits, you know, the entire world and it's really helpful to curb climate change and making sure we're thinking about these large ecological and social biodiversity aspects that the Amazon brings.

Well, Jennifer, thank you for sharing your expertise.

No, thank you for this opportunity. This was really wonderful.

All right. This has been StarTalk. Chuck, always good to have you, man.

Always a pleasure.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.

Stopping Illegal Mining in the Amazon with Satellite Data

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