(CNN) The Amazon rainforest has lost the equivalent of 8.4 million soccer fields over the past decade due to deforestation.

That's about 24,000 square miles, or about 10.3 million American football fields. Put another way, it's the equivalent of losing Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

The stunning figure is from the Royal Statistical Society , which chose it as its international statistic of the decade. The British organization is comprised of statisticians from around the world.

"The statistic only gives a snapshot of the issue, but it really provides an insight into the dramatic change to the landscape that has occurred over the past decade," Liberty Vittert, a visiting scholar at Harvard University and one of the statisticians on the judging panel for the RSS, told CNN.

Statisticians calculated that number using deforestation data from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and FIFA's regulations on pitch dimensions.