Dominican Republic

 Coastal Erosion in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic  Much of the Dominican Republic's coastline is in danger of erosion due to minimally regulated, tourism driven hotel development and the severe impacts of climate change such as sea level rise. While a major percentage of the countries GDP comes from tourism, an approximately $7 billion industry, by not preserving the iconic coastlines, there might not be much left for tourists to see or walk on decades from now.  The invasiveness of the hotels built so close to the coastline threatens coastal ecosystems that are crucial to minimizing erosion, such as mangrove swamps that act as a natural barrier from winds and storm surges. There was also extensive loss of coastland due to category 4 hurricane Irma and category 3 hurricane Maria in 2017. Researchers estimated that about 208 meters of beach were lost after the hurricanes.  The image above is of a Punta Cana business owner, Julio Rodriguez, in standing beside the mark...

Brazil  Today we are changing paths a bit and talking about Brazil! Brazil is the largest country in South America, with a population of about 216 million people. According to news source Brazilian Report, Brazil is "the lightning capitol of the world". There is an average of 77.8 million lightning strikes in Brazil per year.  Rio De Janeiro, Brazil NASA's Earth Observatory describes the reason why so many thunderstorms occur in Brazil. The excessive warm temperatures and moist air lower in the atmosphere energize the storm as the warm air rises. We discussed in this weeks chapter that more severe thunderstorms occur when there is a high amount of water vapor and updraft of air. This is a normal phenomenon in Brazil. The image above comes from PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America). It represents a spacial distribution of annual water vapor flows in mm/yr due to vegetation before human impacts. We can see that a majority of ...