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A long-standing debate was resolved yesterday when a new Nasa-led study confirmed that natural forests in the Amazon remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than they emit. This means that the 5.5 million square kilometer forest is a crucial factor in reducing global warming. Living trees take carbon dioxide out of the air as they grow, and dead trees put the greenhouse gas back into the air as they decompose. Since there was no estimate of how many trees die of natural causes in the Amazon forest, scientists were unclear of the whole equation. The new study, published in Nature Communications on March 18, is the first to measure tree deaths caused by natural processes throughout the Amazon forest, even in remote areas where no data have been collected at ground level.