The Amazon forest gets a lot of its minerals and nutrients from the Sahara!

Even though the Atlantic Ocean separates the world's biggest rainforest and the world's biggest desert, there's a very important relationship between the two of them.

The vas dunes of the Sahara are rich with minerals left from an earlier, more fertile time when the region still had agriculture, plants and animals.

Sand from the desert gets blown up high into the atmosphere, is carried across the Atlantic and falls with the rain across the Amazon. This gives the forest much needed nutrients to support the ecosystem.