The Amazon Rainforest Facts – Visualising What The Numbers Really Mean
There are plenty of facts about the Amazon rainforest, some good, and some quite devastating. But the trouble with such facts is that all too often the numbers are so huge they can become almost impossible to comprehend, and certainly very difficult to visualise.
For example, the Amazon rainforest covers an area of two and a half million square miles. That’s a big number, but you can’t really visualise it can you? All you see is a lot of trees.
To put it slightly into perspective, Australia is around 2.8 million square miles, so the Amazon rainforest is only a little smaller than the entire Australasian continent.
Even more astonishing is the estimate that there are still around 50 Indian tribes living in the Amazon rainforest that have never been discovered and never had contact with the outside world. But it isn’t just the big numbers which are impressive – it’s the actual contribution of the Amazon rainforest to the survival of the planet that needs to be understood.
The Amazon rainforest has often been described as the lungs of the planet, and for good reason. Every single day the Amazonian forests generate 20% of all the oxygen in the atmosphere. Without them we’d quickly start to suffocate. 70% of all plants used in treating cancer are found in the rainforests, and if you lined up every plant, animal and insect in the entire world, every other one of them would live in the Amazon rainforest.
It’s easy to be impressed by these figures and images, but sadly it isn’t all good news. Imagine an acre and a half of rainforest. Not easy is it? So imagine a full size football pitch, which is an acre and a half in size anyway.
Now picture that football pitch full of trees, animals and wildlife. Listen to the exotic birds calling to each other, the gentle drip of the heavy raindrops pattering through the leaves onto the rich soil beneath. Imagine that huge area of stunning and valuable forest.
Now blink your eyes twice. It’s gone.
Quite literally an acre and a half of Amazon rainforest is destroyed forever every single second of the day. It’s hard to visualise isn’t it?
Even harder to visualise is the irreparable damage it is causing by destroying one of the most valuable and diverse natural resources on the planet. We need to do something today, because by this time tomorrow an area of Amazon rainforest more than one and a half times the size of the UK will have vanished forever.