Tropics of Brazil

Parque Nacional Chapada dos Veadeiros, Brasil

One of the interesting pieces of information I learned before heading off to Brazil was about weather and natural disasters. The size of Brazil is 8,511,965 km² compared to the United States of 9,826,630 km² (about a difference of Alaska and Texas combined). Within the United States we have everything from tornadoes, to hurricanes, to earthquakes, blizzards, and flooding thanks to a combination of tectonic plate positions and weather patterns. For being quite close in size, the only major disaster Brazil must worry about is flooding. This is due to the position of the country being relatively far from the edges of its tectonic plate, the lack of dry air combining with humid in a way to form supercell storms, and the lack of ingredients to form cyclones in the southern Atlantic Ocean. The issue lies in being mostly a tropical environment where the season are two: wet and dry. That means, when it rains, it pours. In wilderness relatively untouched, adaptions for these flooding rains can be spotted in the buttress roots of trees to the the structure and behavior of ant colonies. In urban areas lacking the plant roots to prevent erosion and concrete that prevents draining, heavy rains averaging up to 1500 mm (59 inches) mean constant fears of flooding for near half a year.