Amazon Rainforest (1)

With 6 million square kilometers of forest that house “approximately 10% of the world’s biodiversity and 15% of its freshwater”, the Amazon is the world’s largest tropical rainforest. It is more biodiverse than any other single area on the planet, and it is here that some of Earth’s strangest creatures live. Part of the reason for the rainforest’s extensive diversity is the year-round rainfall which gives the forest its name. There is also relatively low variability in temperature throughout the year, which means the Amazon is not a traditional seasonal forest; instead, it has a wet season and a dry season. The entire Amazon Basin gets at least 2000mm of rain annually, with the majority of this rainfall occurring during the wet season. In the central Amazon, the wet season starts around December, controlled by monsoon winds and the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), which is a belt of trade winds that converge around the equator and shift north or south as the seasons change. In the southern Amazon though, the rainy season starts in mid-October— approximately two months before the monsoon winds and the ITCZ bring the storms—because of increased transpiration during the dry season.