What If We Cut Down the Entire Congo Rainforest? Ebola Is Just the Start

In 2012, scientists confirmed a giant tropical peatland hiding under the Congo rainforest, in a swampy region called the Cuvette Centrale. In places, the peat goes almost six metres deep, and some of it has been building up for more than 10,000 years. It holds somewhere between 26 and 32 billion tonnes of carbon, about as much as the whole world releases in three years from every car, power station and factory on Earth. It only stays buried because the swamp stays wet. Cut down the forest, dry out the ground, and that carbon starts escaping into the air. So what happens if the whole Congo rainforest disappears? In this Congo documentary, we explore the Congo Basin and what's still hiding there, from the lesula monkey to bonobos and the Congo peacock. Then we look at what could follow if the forest goes: climate change that hits everyone, a drying Congo River, ecosystem collapse, and even a higher risk of disease outbreaks like Ebola. #congo #climatechange #congorainforest CHAPTERS 0:00 Hidden Under the Congo 0:22 Why the Congo Basin Is Still Unexplored 0:58 The Feather That Took 23 Years to Solve 1:29 The Monkey Nobody Had Named 2:06 What We Haven't Found Yet 2:26 The Legend of Lake Télé 2:50 When the Trees Come Down 3:33 The Rain Stops 4:46 The Ebola Link 5:25 The Buried Carbon 6:15 The Oil Auction 6:39 250 Million Years From Now 7:34 What's Next If you want to know what makes the Congo Basin so hard to explore in the first place, watch our last video, where we put you in a raft on the Sangha River. Most people guess crocodiles, and they're wrong. What do you think is still hiding in the Congo that nobody has found yet? Tell us in the comments 👇 Subscribe to Aeons Later for more stories about the deep past and the far future. SOURCES: University of Leeds, Nature, Nature Geoscience, University of Bristol, CIFOR, NPR, American Museum of Natural History, IUCN, Rainforest Foundation UK    • Update