Six million square kilometres of jungle, mostly in Brazil
The Amazon rainforest blankets most of a 7-million-square-kilometre basin, with roughly 6 million square kilometres under moist broadleaf canopy, over half of Earth's remaining rainforest. Brazil holds about sixty percent, Peru thirteen, Colombia ten, with smaller shares across Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and the three Guianas.
More than 30 million people from some 350 ethnic groups live across nine national systems and 3,344 recognised Indigenous territories; Indigenous peoples are nine percent of residents, and about sixty groups remain largely isolated. Large-scale clearing continues, and a 2023 World Bank report argued Brazilian deforestation losses can run roughly seven times higher than the value of commodities produced by felling.
The river’s European name traces to Francisco de Orellana’s fight with Tapuya and other warriors whose women fought beside men, reminding him of Greek Amazons.
People arrived at least 11,200 years ago, judging from finds at Caverna da Pedra Pintada. Archaeologist Betty Meggers argued that poor soils kept the forest thinly settled, but later estimates put perhaps 5 million inhabitants in the region by 1500, and one projection exceeds 8 million in 1492. Geoglyphs dated between AD 1 and 1250, first spotted by Ondemar Dias in 1977, support the picture of complex societies. By the early 1980s the native population had fallen below 200,000.
The forest itself probably took shape in the Eocene and has lasted at least 55 million years. Its soils get help from across an ocean: NASA's CALIPSO satellite estimates that 182 million tons of Saharan dust blow west each year, and over 56 per cent of the dust fertilising the Amazon comes from Chad's Bodélé depression, replacing phosphorus that rain and floods wash away. A more detailed count gives Brazil 58.4 per cent of the forest, Peru 12.8 and Bolivia 7.7.
Source: Amazon rainforest
