North and South America are neighbors, so it’s tempting to think that they’re pretty close. But the Earth is a sphere, so it’s no faster to travel halfway across the globe north-to-south than it is to fly east-to-west. Rio’s actually a really long flight from New York—about three quarters of the time it takes to go over the pole and get to Shanghai.
We also tend to think that the two continents are roughly in the same place. But Brazil is quite a bit east of anywhere in the US. So our departure took us in a route I’d never done before: out over the Atlantic and to the south, passing well east of familiar places like Florida. Given the lack of sleep most passengers suffered due to the prior night’s flight cancellation, the crew dimmed the lights and asked everyone to close their blinds, allowing most of us a chance to catch up on a bit of shuteye.
However, this route promised to take us over the Amazon, and I was more than a little curious about something that, by all accounts, is one of the Earths’ most fantastic features. Clearly, I wasn’t going to get any sense of the environment or the vast diversity of life it fosters from 40,000 feet, but I figured I might get a sense of its immense scale. From this vantage point, perhaps I could even look at the degree of human intrusion as well.
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