THE AMAZON: The Jungle That Makes Its Own Rain | 4K Travel Documentary

The Amazon does not get its rain from the sky. It makes its own. Spread across 5.5 million square kilometers and nine countries, the Amazon basin holds the largest continuous tropical rainforest on Earth — 390 billion trees that release roughly 20 billion tons of water vapor into the atmosphere every day. That is more water, by volume, than the Amazon River itself discharges into the Atlantic Ocean over the same 24 hours. The river you can see is smaller than the river of vapor moving above it. This 4K travel documentary journeys from the meeting of the Rio Negro and the Solimões at Manaus, through the rubber-boom history of the Putumayo, into the Yanomami territory and the Vale do Javari, down to the Atlantic delta at Belém. It examines the science of the biotic pump — the continent-scale machine made of living trees that produces South America's weather — and the question that scientists like Carlos Nobre have spent forty years trying to answer: how close is the system to the threshold beyond which it can no longer keep itself wet? The forest is not gone. It is also not safe. What is being decided in the next twenty years is which of those two truths will hold. See More Documentaries:    • THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ: The Only Passage Whe...   Subscribe:    / @uncutearth4k