Rainforest Water Cycle
Understand how the water cycle works in a rainforest — trees absorb water through their roots and release it through their leaves (transpiration), this moisture forms clouds above the canopy, and the clouds produce rain that falls back into the forest — creating a self-sustaining cycle that generates much of the rainforest's own rainfall
What a learner can do afterwards
- Describe the sequence: trees absorb water → release it through leaves (transpiration) → moisture rises → clouds form → rain falls
- Explain that rainforests generate much of their own rainfall through this cycle
- Use the word transpiration correctly when describing how water leaves a plant through its leaves
1 · Read
You already know the water cycle: water evaporates, forms clouds, and falls back down as rain. You also know a rainforest stays hot, with rain in every month. A rainforest does something extra. Its trees are so good at moving water that they help build much of their own rain.
Follow the water through the forest. Roots pull water out of the soil. The tree carries it up to the leaves, which let it go into the air as vapor. The vapor rises, cools, and gathers into clouds. Then rain falls back onto the forest.
Five steps, left to right, from the soil back to the rain.
A giant kapok tree, one of the tallest trees in the Amazon rainforest, pulls water up from the soil through its roots all day long. Then it releases that water into the air through its leaves. That release is called transpiration. Multiply this by billions of trees, and clouds start forming above the forest by afternoon.
The word transpiration sounds a bit like perspiration, which means sweating. It works the same way: water moves from inside the leaf out into the air.
Every time a rainforest tree releases water through transpiration, it helps build the very clouds that will rain back down on it.
2 · Watch
Take it off screen
Where it sits
This opens up
Where this leads
Jobs that lean on this skill. Follow one to see everything it is built on.
8 questions wait behind this lesson, each with its answer explained. Every answer feeds the sky: stars light as they are learned, and dim when it is time to come back.