LIMA, Oct. 7(Xinhuanet)-- The water level of the world's second longest river, the 6,437-km-long Amazon, has fallen to its 40-year low in Peru in 2005, Eduardo Lazo, the Peruvian navy's Amazon Hydrology and Navigation Service's director, said on Friday.

Lazo said rainfall has decreased in the Andean mountains that feed the upper Amazon and the confluent Maranon and Ucayali rivers.

Meanwhile, Peru's National Meteorological Service(SENAMHI) said that this happens following a series of recent hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and years of deforestation in the Amazon jungle,the local press reported on Friday,

"Because of the hurricanes in the Northern Hemisphere, it has not rained in the jungle since August," the service said. In Peru's main Amazon jungle town Iquitos, 1,010 km northeast of Lima,water volumes in October have fallen from a normal average of 25,000 to 12,000 cubic meters a second, the service told the daily newspaper Peru.21 on Friday.

Many scientists believed the storms formed by rising air in the north Atlantic had caused the air above the Amazon to descend and prevent cloud formation and rainfall.

Since August, several strong hurricanes have hit the Gulf of Mexico, and they include Katrina, which killed about 1,200 people in the southern United States, and Hurricane Stan, which left more than 240 people dead in southern Mexico and Central America.

Deforestation leads to droughts as it decreases air moisture and increases sunlight. It also causes excessive runoff and prevents the water table from increasing reserves.

Peru's Amazon jungle area has lost 10 million hectares to deforestation due to farming and drug trafficking in recent years, according to private studies. Enditem