The Congo Basin

The Congo Basin is the drainage basin of the Congo River, spanning roughly 3.7 million square kilometers across nine central African countries including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Gabon, Angola and Zambia. Structurally it sits atop the ancient Congo Craton, a stable continental block that has subsided gradually over hundreds of millions of years and filled with sediment, producing the broad, shallow bowl shape the basin holds today. Much of the basin is covered by the Congo Basin rainforest, the second largest contiguous tropical rainforest in the world after the Amazon, and its interior wetlands and swamp forest, often called the Cuvette Centrale, hold peatlands now understood to be among the largest tropical carbon stores on Earth.