article_snippet: Last month, a Nasa satellite revealed the stunning link between the Sahara desert and the the Amazon rainforest.
article_snippet: For the first time a Nasa satellite showed vast dust clouds travelling high in the atmosphere.
article_snippet: Scientists have not only measured the volume of dust, Scientists have also calculated how much phosphorus – remnant in Saharan sands from part of the desert's past as a lake bed – gets carried across the Atlantic Ocean from one of the planet's most desolate places to one of the planet most fertile.
article_snippet: The data show that wind and weather pick up on average 182 million tons of dust each year and carry each year past the western edge of Sahara at longitude
article_snippet: dust then travels 1,600 miles across the Atlantic Ocean, though some drops to the surface or is flushed from the sky by rain.
article_snippet: Near the eastern coast of South America, at longitude 35W, 132 million tons remain in the air, and 27.7 million tons – enough to fill 104,908 semi trucks – fall to the surface over the Amazon basin.
article_snippet: About 43 million tons of dust travel farther to settle out over the Caribbean Sea, past longitude 75W.
article_snippet: The results support the findings of a paper published last year in Nature published last year based on aircraft data.