The Amazon’s River in the Sky

When I first saw that the Amazon rainforest was on fire, it made me immediately think of the episode I saw of the recent series on Netflix called ‘One Strange Rock’. Its a phenomenal series narrated by the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, interviewing astronauts like the rock star Chris Hadfield about their perspectives on the planet from space, and then diving into some of the magical science that allows our planet to continue to hum. Here’s a sample of the Amazon rainforest episode.

Astronauts in space cannot see the Amazon rainforest most of the time because of a river of clouds swollen with water obscuring their view. That river flows to the Andes mountains where it erodes the rock and takes the sediment back into the Amazon river basin and eventually the ocean. It is in the ocean that this sediment serves as fertilizer for diatoms, a type of microalgae, that are responsible for something like 50% of the oxygen on the planet.

Here is a 2-minute clip from the same episode about the diatoms.