Fires have burned 3 percent of Amazon rainforest in 12 years: NASA

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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/09/fires-have-burned-3-percent-of-amazon-rainforest-in-12-years-nasa/




The size of the Amazon rainforest has been shrinking – and not just because of traditional deforestation.

Fires that creep slowly and low in the forest understory burned nearly 3 percent of the world’s largest tropical rainforest in a little more than a decade, scientists at NASA say.

Because they are hard to measure from space, “we've never known the regional extent or frequency of these understory fires," said Doug Morton of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., the lead author of a study publicized by the space agency Friday.

The study estimated that between 1999 and 2010, understory forest fires burned more than 33,000 square miles (85,500 square kilometers), or 2.8 percent of the forest.