Ask anyone to name the world’s great rainforests and you get “the Amazon” followed by a long pause. The pause is doing the Congo Basin dirty, so let’s fix that.
Amazon: 6,815,645 km². Congo Basin: 1,925,655 km².
The Amazon is three and a half Congos, which sounds like a knockout until you look at what a Congo actually is. Nearly the size of Mexico. Three Frances of unbroken canopy. Second place on this particular podium is still one of the largest living things ever assembled.
The Congo’s own highlight reel
- The river that drains it is the deepest on Earth, plunging past 220 metres in places. There are shipwrecks in shallower water than the Congo’s riverbed.
- Around 60 per cent of the forest sits in one country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
- Its central swamps hide one of the great carbon vaults on the planet. The Cuvette Centrale peatlands hold roughly 30 billion tonnes of carbon, on the order of three years of global emissions, parked under a bog.
- It’s the only home of the bonobo, which lives nowhere on Earth except south of the Congo river, plus forest elephants and the okapi, an animal that looks like a giraffe photobombing a zebra.
The Amazon counters with 390 billion trees, a river with no bridges and a fifth of the planet’s flowing fresh water. These two aren’t rivals so much as the first and second lungs of the tropics.
Put them in the ring anyway
Open Amazon vs Congo. Equal Earth projection, honest areas, both forests as draggable shapes.
Two moves worth your time. Drag the Congo across the Atlantic and nest it inside the Amazon, where it fits three and a half times. Then drag the Amazon onto Africa and watch it swallow the Congo Basin whole and keep reaching across the continent.
Then add a country from the picker. The USA, India, take your pick. Watch nations queue up for a size comparison against vegetation. That’s the real headline here.