Climate Change In the end, Oglesby speculated, th
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Posted On: 08/08/2021 11:18:45 PM
Climate Change
In the end, Oglesby speculated, the increased productivity the Maya gained by farming the bajos might have made them too successful. “Population pressure might then have led to their having to clear more and more land, both for settlement and for agriculture,” he said. Oglesby has used three-dimensional regional climate models to help visualize the Mayan demise, and what he has found so far is intriguing.
“If we completely deforest the area and replace it with grassland, we find that it gets considerably warmer—as much as 5 to 6 degrees Celsius,” Oglesby said. Sunlight that normally evaporates water from the rainforest canopy would instead heat the ground. Although his model paints a more extreme picture than what actually happened (the region was heavily, but probably not completely deforested), Oglesby suspects that deforestation contributed to a drought. Lake sediment cores indicate that the Mayan deforestation appears to have coincided with natural climate variability that was already producing a drought. “Combined with the land-use changes, the drought was a double whammy,” he said. By 950 A.D., the Mayan lowland cities were largely deserted
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https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Maya
In the end, Oglesby speculated, the increased productivity the Maya gained by farming the bajos might have made them too successful. “Population pressure might then have led to their having to clear more and more land, both for settlement and for agriculture,” he said. Oglesby has used three-dimensional regional climate models to help visualize the Mayan demise, and what he has found so far is intriguing.
“If we completely deforest the area and replace it with grassland, we find that it gets considerably warmer—as much as 5 to 6 degrees Celsius,” Oglesby said. Sunlight that normally evaporates water from the rainforest canopy would instead heat the ground. Although his model paints a more extreme picture than what actually happened (the region was heavily, but probably not completely deforested), Oglesby suspects that deforestation contributed to a drought. Lake sediment cores indicate that the Mayan deforestation appears to have coincided with natural climate variability that was already producing a drought. “Combined with the land-use changes, the drought was a double whammy,” he said. By 950 A.D., the Mayan lowland cities were largely deserted
read full article
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Maya
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