Two people were confirmed dead on Wednesday as heavy rains pounded southwest Japan, prompting flood and landslide warnings and orders for 670,000 people to seek safety.

The fires tearing through the Amazon represent a "tipping point" for the health of the rainforest, the head of a top global forestry management body said Wednesday, urging the world to do more to save the trees.

The situation in the Amazon is "very urgent," stressed Gerhard Dieterle, executive director of the International Tropical Timber Organisation, an intergovernmental agency group that promotes sustainable forestry use.

The Latest on the summit of leaders from the Group of Seven democracies (all times local):

10 p.m.

The G7 has agreed to spend 20 million euros ($22 million) on the Amazon, mainly to send fire-fighting aircraft to tackle the huge blazes engulfing the world's biggest rainforest, the presidents of France and Chile announced Monday.

Skimming low over the gleaming white glaciers on Greenland's coast in a modified 1940s plane, three NASA scientists, led by an Elvis-impersonating oceanographer, waited to drop a probe into the water beneath them.

Pope Francis on Sunday voiced concern for the Amazon rainforest, a "vital" lung for the planet, as the worst blazes in years have sparked a global outcry.

Hundreds of new fires are raging in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, official data showed Saturday, as thousands of troops were made available to help fight the worst blazes in years following a global outcry. 

The thousands of fires burning in the Amazon don't look like the major forest fires of Europe or North America -- instead, they are fueled mainly by branches, vegetation and other byproducts of deforestation in cleared areas, experts say.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Friday called the wildfires raging in the Amazon rainforest "an international crisis", ahead of a G7 summit that will hammer out a response to the issue.

Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro said Friday he is considering deploying the army to help combat fires raging in the Amazon rainforest, as a growing global outcry over the blazes threatens to torpedo a huge trade deal.