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Imagine the sizes of the UK and Ireland. Now multiply that by 17.
What does that equal to? The world's LARGEST tropical rainforest, The Amazon. It's approximately 2.1 million square miles.
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The Amazon rainforest is located in South America & spans across 9 countries.
Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana (GEE ahh NUH), Guyana (GUY ANNA), Peru, Suriname (SIR IH NAHM) and Venezuela.
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It's home to a whole host of fascinating – and deadly! – creatures, including electric
eels, flesh eating piranhas, poison dart frogs, jaguars and some seriously venomous snakes.
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If the Amazon rainforest was a country, it would rank
9th in size.
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Around 400-500 indigenous Amerindian tribes call the Amazon rainforest home.
It’s believed that about fifty of these tribes have never had contact with the outside world!
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The Amazon is estimated to have 16,000 tree species and
390 billion individual trees
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This area of immense natural beauty is sometimes referred to as ‘the lungs of the Earth’. This is because the rich vegetation takes carbon dioxide out of the air, and releases oxygen back in.
In fact, more than 20% of the world’s oxygen is produced by the Amazon.
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Due to the thickness of the canopy (the top branches and leaves of the trees), the Amazon floor is in permanent darkness.
it’s so thick that when it rains, it takes around ten minutes for the water to reach the ground!
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Unfortunately, the Amazon Rainforest is in trouble. In Brazil, Since the 1970s, there's been deforestation.
This means the removal of a forest or stand of trees where the land is thereafter converted to a non-forest use. Examples include conversion of forestland to farms, ranches, or urban use.
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The leading cause of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest is Cattle ranching.
Going as far as the 1960s, government figures approved 38 percent of deforestation from 1966-1975 to large-scale cattle ranching. Today the figure in Brazil is closer to 70 percent.
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So don't forget to recycle.
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