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Every single year 27 million tonnes of African dust drops out of the sky into the Amazon basin.

Astronaut Chris Hadley, who has spent 166 days in space, shares how he got to see all the amazing process in Nat Geo's new documentary One Strange Rock.

“We can see from orbit ...it turns out it’s the perfect fertiliser.”

As they grow the plants and trees turns carbon dioxide into oxygen.

One single tree can produce enough oxygen to support two people.

The Amazon rainforest is ten times the size of Texas producing 20x more oxygen than the people of the Earth could consume, but not one breath of it leaves the Amazon.

(Image: Robert Harding World Imagery) (Image: National Geographic)

There’s so many animals living there that the life there uses it all up.

National Geographic’s One Strange Rock looks at how interlinked everything is, and how the process that starts here - in the Amazon - ends up right back here. Everything links, feeding each other

Narrated by Will Smith the series looks at a different part of how our planet works each week.

In the first episode we get to see how the Amazon helps us breath, but not in the way you’d think.

“For all these years I’ve been thinking that the rainforest was the lungs of the planet,” says Will Smith. “It helps us breathe, but not because of air.”

(Image: iStockphoto)

It’s all down to a river in the Amazon, but not the one you’re thinking of, the River in the Sky.

The International Space Station is one million ft above the planet. From such a vantage point the astronauts can see it in action - sort of.

“Some places in the world are easy to take photos of, like the outback of Australia, it’s always a sunny day there, but some parts of the world you can never take a picture of,” says Hadfield. “One is the Amazon basin. It makes you think, what’s going on down there?”

One person that knows, is climatologist Dr. Rosa Maria Dos Santos.

For the past ten years she’s been covering the surprising way the rainforest has been helping the whole planet breathe.

With everything going on so far beyond our reach, Dr. Rosa uses the tallest structure in all South America, a red and white tower that breaks through the rainforest canopy.

(Image: National Geographic)

Dr. Rosa has tried to climb it twice before, but she’s never made it to the top to attach her equipment - until now.

The first time there was a lightning storm, the second she was so tired, her legs couldn’t take anymore.

“This time I’ll make it. I’m excited,” she said as she began her ascent.

While Dr. Rosa was rising to the top, something else was too.

If you could look inside the trees you would see water that’s been sucked up from the forest floor.

When the water hits the top the combination of sun and wind turns it into a mighty river - a flying river.

“With this tower we can see how big this flying river really is,” Dr. Rosa said. “If it was a normal river it would be the largest on the planet. Even bigger than the Amazon river beneath it.”

But it doesn’t stop there.

(Image: National Geographic)

As Astronaut Hadfield says the river looks more like a cloud from space - it’s what he saw obstructing it.

“This river of cloud flows across America obscuring everything beneath it until it runs into a brick wall.”

That wall is four miles high and we know it as The Andes.

The clouds condense into raindrops, race down the slopes and flow into the Amazon basin again.

The water erodes the rock, turning it into sediment, until all the nutrients are dumped into the ocean. It’s a whole other world.

Waiting there is an organism, four times thinner than a human hair. It’s called a diatom.

These are the secret to our oxygen supply. They use silica from the rock to create new shells, which allow them to reproduce.

Amazingly, their population doubles every day and they photosynthesise - each one producing oxygen.

“Take a breath, take another - one was provided by these little guys,” says Will Smith.

(Image: National Geographic) (Image: National Geographic)

You don’t notice them around you, but from space the astronauts can see them - stunning blues and greens, marking where the diatom are, keeping us alive.

One Strange Rock looks at how the diatoms help us while alive and while dead.

The diatoms have to get their nutrients in different ways, far away from the rainforest, in the ice. As the ice melts it releases a familiar sound, the sound of Rice Krispies popping. The sound is a sign the ice is about to crash.

One collapse dumps tonnes of ice into the sea. It's "diatom dinner time” as Will Smith says.

(Image: National Geographic)

The glaciers move fast, dumping nutrients into the sea, sparking a feeding frenzy - and that means a population explosion. Then, as fast as it began, it’s over.

As the nutrients run out, the diatoms fade and die. The carcases though fall to the floor of the sea, carpeting it. It’s called marine snow as it looks like snowflakes.

There’s a key difference though. They never melt. Instead, the sea bed rises and the ocean levels falls and that floor becomes a salty desert. The desert we began with, the very one that ended up in the Amazon. It shows how everything is linked and comes full circle.

From the dust, to the River in the Sky, to diatoms and the ice - all so we can breathe.

National Geographic's One Strange Rock is on at 8pm on Nat Geo. Gasp is the first episode in the series.