Amazon Deforestation: NASA Images Show The Great Rainforest Disappearing

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By Huffington Post | 08 August 2012 | 208

A newly released pair of satellite photos highlights a nagging environmental problem for the host of the 2016 Olympics: deforestation of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil. Taken by NASA's Landsat 1 satellite in 1975 and 2012, the two images reveal dramatic effects of clear-cutting for roads and agriculture in Rondônia, a rural state in western Brazil. This process began with the construction of a major north-south highway in the 1970s, according to NASA's Earth Observatory, followed by secondary roads through dense forest at right angles to the first road. As settlers continued expanding over the decades — first by cutting down trees, then burning ground cover — their merging agricultural tracts took on a "fishbone pattern," as NASA describes it. Read More