The Green Lung Under Pressure (cool)
The forest the world forgot to count
The Congo Basin holds the second-largest tropical rainforest on Earth, and beneath its central swamp forests lies a peatland the size of England — a carbon store discovered only in 2017, and still barely mapped.
A basin, classified
Framed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the atlas separates lowland rainforest from the flooded forests threading the Cuvette Centrale — the wet heart where peat accumulates metres deep.
Where water writes the map
Filtering to tropical flooded and peat forests strips the basin down to its wettest tissue. These are the pixels that matter most for carbon, and the ones most sensitive to a drying season.
What is at stake
Draining or burning these peat forests would release carbon accumulated over ten thousand years in a matter of decades. Mapping them precisely is the first step to keeping them wet.