This document contains all of the case studies you need to ace the Water and Carbon Cycles section of your Geography exams. Tailor made for AQA A level Geography by a triple A* student, it can also be used for other exam boards and qualifications. Please do message me if you have any questions!
Water and Carbon Cycles Case Study Pack - A level Geography
This case study pack contains:
● 1x Detailed Amazon Rainforest
● 1x Detailed Eden Basin
● 1x Detailed useful information and stats
, Amazon Rainforest
- Amazon rainforest covers 6.7 million km squared
- Amazon rainforest is the world’s largest tropical rainforest and covers 40% of South
America’s land mass
- It is home to over 1 million species of plant, over 500 species of mammals and over
2,000 species of fish. Many endangered species also live there
Water cycle
- The water cycle causes the Amazon to be very wet - there is a lot of evaporation over
the Atlantic Ocean, and the wet air is blown towards the Amazon. This contributes to
the Amazon’s very high rainfall
- Warm temperatures mean that evaporation is high in the rainforest itself, which
increases the amount of precipitation
- The rainforest has a dense canopy - this means that interception is high. As a result,
less water flows into rivers than might otherwise be expected, and it does so more
slowly
- The water cycle affects the Amazon environment - it is populated by species that are
adapted to high humidity and frequent rainfall
- Average rainfall is very high in the Amazon, at around 2300 mm per year
- Only around ⅓ of the rainfall over the Amazon makes its way into the Atlantic ocean.
- Up to half of the rainfall in some areas may never reach the ground, being intercepted
by the forest and re-evaporated into the atmosphere
- Additional evaporation occurs from ground and river surfaces, or is released into the
atmosphere by transpiration from plant leaves (in which plants release water from
their leaves during photosynthesis)
- This moisture contributes to the formation of rain clouds, which release the water
back onto the rainforest. In the Amazon, 50-80 percent of moisture remains in the
ecosystem’s water cycle
Effects of deforestation on the water cycle -
- Deforestation reduces the rate of evapotranspiration, meaning less water reaches the
atmosphere, less clouds are formed and rainfall is reduced. This increases the risk of
drought
- In deforested areas, there is no canopy to intercept rainfall, so more water reaches
the ground. There is too much to all soak into the soil, so it instead moves to rivers as
surface runoff, which increases the risk of flooding
Carbon cycle
- The Amazon stores a lot of carbon in its vegetation and soil, more than it produces,
so it is a carbon sink (Absorbs 2.2 billion tons of CO2 yearly, produces 1.9 billion tons
of CO2 yearly)
- The increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has led to increased
productivity in the Amazon rainforest because the vegetation can access more CO2
for photosynthesis - amount of biomass has been increasing
- As a result, the amount of CO2 sequestered (absorbed) by the Amazon rainforest
has increased, making it an even more important carbon store
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