Amazon rainforest with fog in the morning near Alta Floresta, Mato Grosso, Brazil

© Pulsar Imagens/Alam

A misty morning in Brazil

The Amazon rainforest is big. Almost unimaginably big. To begin to grasp its immensity, consider these numbers: The Amazon rainforest covers about 2% of the world's surface area, nearly 2.1 million square miles across South America, mostly (nearly 60%) in the country you see here, Brazil. It's an area that accounts for over half the Earth's remaining rainforests. The breadth of biodiversity is incomparable – nearly 16,000 different tree species, 40,000 species of other plants, 2.5 million insect species, and over 2,000 different types of birds and mammals. Incredibly, perhaps a tenth of the planet's known species call the Amazon home, many of which have not even been identified.