The Amazon Rainforest is a large tropical rainforest occupying the drainage basin of the Amazon River and its many tributaries.

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 The Amazon Rainforest is a large tropical rainforest occupying the drainage basin of the Amazon River and its many tributaries. The Amazon Rainforest is located between latitudes of 2° North and 10° South of the equator and longititudes of between 42° and 75° of the North Pole. The forest includes the greater part of Brazil and Peru, significant parts of Columbia, Ecuador, and a very small area of Venezuela.

 The Amazon rainforest covers a total area of 6,000,000 square km (2,300,000 square miles). Comprising about 40 percent of Brazil’s total area, the vast rainforest is bounded by the Guiana Highlands to the north, the Andes Mountain ranges to the west, the Brazilian central plateau to the south and Atlantic Ocean to the east. The Amazon Rainforest widens from a 320 km front to a belt 1,900km wide where it meets the Andean foothills.

 The Amazon Rainforest represents about half of the Earth’s remaining rainforest and also constitutes its largest reserve of biological resources. More than half of the worlds estimated 10 million species of plants, animals and insects live in this complex ecosystem of great biodiversity

 The immense extent and great continuity of the Amazon rainforest is a reflection of the high rainfall, high humidity, and monotonously high temperatures that prevail in the region

   The Amazon Rainforest is the world’s richest and most varied biological reservoir, containing several million species of insects, plants, birds and other forms of life, many still unrecorded by science

 The length of day and night is equal on the equator, which runs along the forest, and the usually clear nights allow rapid radiation of the heat received from the sun during the day. There is a greater difference between daytime and midnight temperatures than between the warmest and coolest months. Therefore night could be considered as the winter of the Amazon. The average daily temperature in the forest is 32°C in September and 24°C in April, but the humidity is consistently high and often oppressive. During the winter months of the Southern Hemisphere, a powerful south-polar air mass pours northward into the Amazon region, causing temperatures to plunge to as low as 14°C. At anytime of the year, several days of heavy rain can be succeeded by clear, sunny days and fresh cool nights with relatively low humidity.

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 About half of the precipitation that falls in the Amazon originates from the Atlantic Ocean, the other half comes from evapotranspiration from the forest itself and associated convectional storms. Rainfall in the lowlands typically ranges from 1,500 to 3,000 millimetres (60 to 120 inches) annually in the central Amazon basin. On the eastern and western margins of the basin, rainfall occurs throughout the year, whereas in the central part of the basin there is a definite drier period, usually from June to November. However this dry season is not sufficiently intense to arrest plant growth.

 

  Since “World ...

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