The desert that feeds the jungle

Every year, the wind lifts millions of tonnes of dust from the Sahara and pushes it across the entire Atlantic, a journey of more than eight thousand kilometres.

Much of that dust falls on the Amazon. And it isn't dirt: it's fertiliser. NASA's satellites calculated that some twenty-two thousand tonnes of phosphorus — the very nutrient in agricultural fertilisers — land on the rainforest each year, replacing almost exactly what the tropical rains wash out of the soil.

Most of that phosphorus comes from a single place: the Bodélé Depression in Chad, the bed of an ancient lake full of microorganisms that died millennia ago.

The driest place feeding the greenest, with an ocean in between. The planet works as a single organism.

Source: NASA