The Amazon river is the most. Amazon river

The Amazon is the longest river on all globe. Its waters carry one fifth of everything. This majestic river is formed from the confluence of two small waterways - the Marañon and the Ucayali. Their sources are located in the Andes mountain range.

Where does the Amazon flow? General characteristics of the river

The length of the river, according to various estimates, ranges from 6259 to 6800 km. It is believed that the river was named Spanish conquerors in honor of the brave warriors who fought on the banks of this river along with the Indian tribes. The Spaniards, seeing fearless women, remembered the legend of the brave mythological Amazons, which is why the river got its name. The conquistadors did not know where the Amazon began and where it flowed, but even then the river impressed them with its power and grandeur, reminding them of the legendary warlike women.

When the dry season arrives, the width of the Amazon decreases to 11 km in width, and covers about 110,000 km 2 of area with water. During the rainy season, the area approximately triples in size. The mouth of the Amazon is the largest in the world. The width of its delta is 325 km. From the point where the Amazon flows into Atlantic Ocean, and for two-thirds of the length of the channel (about 4300 km) the river is navigable.

The river is an extensive system of forests and rivers that extends to Brazil. The Amazon has the deepest basin on the entire planet - 7.2 million km 2. The length of the Marañon River, which gives rise to the Amazon, is about 1,700 km, and the Ucayali is more than 1,600 km.

For ordinary travelers, the question “Where does the Amazon River begin and where does it flow?” may be difficult. The depth of the river at Obidus reaches 135 m - approximately the same as at Baltic Sea. With all its numerous tributaries, the Amazon forms a gigantic water system, the total length of which is about 25,000 km.

Where does the Amazon originate and where does it flow?

Researchers have still not come to a consensus on which point should be considered the beginning of the great Amazon. The Ucayali River, which gives birth to the great river, is also formed by the confluence of two waterways - Tambo and Urubamba. Their origins are located in Central Andes. The length of the Ucayali River is about 1900 km. It is navigable up to the small town of Kumaria. The main river port is located in the Peruvian city of Pucallpa, separated from civilization.

Many scientists consider Ucayali to be the source of the Amazon. If we adhere to this point of view and include the length of the Ucayali in the total length of the Amazon, then the length of the river will be about 7100 km. In other words, the Amazon will become longer than the Nile, by 400 km. But the generally accepted answer to the question “Where does the Amazon begin and where does it flow?” the next one is considered. The source of the river is the confluence of the Ucayali and Marañon; mouth - Atlantic Ocean.

What is unusual about Ucayali - the mother of the Amazon

The Ucayali River is home to something unusual. Its waters have become home to a giant otter and an Amazonian manatee. To this day, the territory of the Ucayali River basin is inhabited by Indian tribes who have no contact with the civilized world. In wooden barrels they prepare a heady drink from cassava, which tastes like beer - masatu. Indians know well vegetable world Amazon basin, herbs are used for medicinal purposes.

Amazon Delta

Occupies about 100,000 km 2. Lives in this place a large number of freshwater sharks. The presence of these predators is due to the fact that from the point where the Amazon flows into the ocean and another 300 km. from the mouth, salty water The Atlantic is diluted with fresh river waters. Dangerous fish rise along the river for 3500 km.

The delta area is dotted with straits and islands. The mouth itself does not protrude into the ocean, but, on the contrary, goes deep into the continent, which is due to strong ocean tides. “River-sea” is what the locals call the mouth of the Amazon. So where does the Amazon River flow? In its delta, the Atlantic Ocean is the rightful owner. Researchers have conventionally divided the mouth of the Amazon into three main branches, but in fact its territory is covered with an innumerable number of branches.

What was the name of the Amazon in the past?

Aboriginal people have settled on the banks of the Amazon since ancient times. They knew well where the Amazon River flowed and used this advantage for shipping and trade. One of the first European residents to visit this territory was the merchant and navigator Amerigo Vespucci. In those days, the river had a slightly different name - “Santa Maria of the Fresh Sea”.

Pororoca - the inexorable element of the river delta

We have already found out where the Amazon flows into the ocean. During high tides, the so-called pororoka is formed here, which translated from the Indian language means “thundering water.” This noise is born from the stormy meeting of the powerful waters of a huge river with ocean waters. As a result of the collision of waters, a giant shaft is formed, which rushes against the current of the Amazon, destroying any obstacles in its path.

The Atlantic area where the Amazon River flows often produces huge tidal waves. The poison is so strong that it can turn any small ship upside down. The waves reach more than 4 m in height and do not subside for thirty minutes. All surrounding areas towards the upper reaches of the river are destroyed and devastated by powerful waves that rush at a speed of 25 km/h. The natives of the Amazon consider the poroco to be a living and merciless spirit that protects the river.

Last minute tours Worldwide

The Amazon is one of the natural wonders of the planet, familiar to everyone from school. In terms of popularity, this river can compete with the Egyptian Nile and the Indian Ganges. Unique ecosystem of the longest on earth water artery(more than 7 thousand km from the source of the Apachete) attracts lovers of thrills, exotics, South American flora and fauna, and just ordinary tourists who want to expand the boundaries of their travels.

Emerging into the Atlantic Ocean, the Amazon forms the world's largest delta. The largest river island of Marajo, located right in the delta, the giant water lily Victoria regia, huge palm trees, the largest freshwater fish on the planet and river dolphin included in the list of Amazonian “rarities”.

The Amazon is believed to have been discovered by the Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana in the 16th century. Initially, the conqueror of the New World wanted to give the river his name, but eventually changed his mind. The river owes its name to a mysterious tribe of female warriors who attacked Orellana’s detachment. Currently in doubt real existence Amazons. Their role could well have been played by men with long hair.

Headwaters and tributaries

The main question that arises in the debate about the Paraná Tingo or “Queen of the Rivers”, as the Amazon is called by the locals, is whether its waters are the longest on the planet, and, if so, where the source of the river is located. 15 years ago, in the mid-90s. 20th century, an international expedition, going to the Peruvian mountains, was able to give an accurate answer, which is currently the official version included in geography textbooks.

The source of the Amazon is the Apachete stream, which, having passed enough long haul, merging with other streams and rivers, it turns into Apurimac, and then through Ucayali - into the Amazon. It is noteworthy that the Ucayali River is located in Peru, just like the Marañon River, which for a long time was considered as the main source.

Before the expedition to the Andes, which put an end to the debate about the Amazon, the Nile occupied first place among the longest rivers on the planet, but persistent South American researchers were able to prove that the Amazon is longer. The difference is literally several hundred meters.

The number of tributaries making the Queen of Rivers the deepest on the planet is enormous. Over five hundred rivers and streams flow into the Amazon. 9 are considered the largest, among them about 20 are more than 1.5 thousand km long. An interesting effect is associated with one of the tributaries: at the confluence of the Rio Negro, near the Brazilian city of Manaus, the Amazon is two-colored. Some of the water is white, some is dark. The light shade is explained by the fact that the Amazon carries a large amount of silt.

Until the confluence with the Rio Negro, the Amazon has a completely different name - Solimões (that's the name of the river in Brazil) or Rio de Janeiro Marañon (Peruvian name).

Amazon Hotels

The main means of accommodation in the Amazon are lodges, and the lodges are very diverse in terms of service and quality of service provision - from modest 3* to luxurious 5*.

Flora and fauna of the Amazon

The navigable Amazon is home to many animals. Species diversity freshwater fish up to one third of total number all over the earth. The most famous among river inhabitants are the giant arapaima, the maximum known weight 200 kg, length up to 3 m, and piranhas, dangerous for people, ranging from 13 cm to 40 cm in length. The hero of many horror films - a huge anaconda boa constrictor - also lives in the waters of the Amazon and, under certain circumstances, can harm a person. Generally speaking, the local nature is extremely dangerous for bipeds, and stories about bloodthirsty caimans are not fiction, but the harsh truth, although, as the aborigines testify, in order to get into their teeth, you must at least get outside big water and go deeper into the rain forests.

One of the main tourist attractions for travelers in the Amazon is catching piranhas for raw meat. Day and night canoe trips are also popular, during which you can get acquainted with the animal and plant world.

Almost the entire Amazon basin is framed by jungle, covering the territory of nine South American countries - Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, etc. The abundance of vegetation, in addition to the river itself, is responsible for the rains, of which a huge amount falls here.

Amazon nature

Amazon cities

Most of the river flows through Brazil. The largest Brazilian port is Manaus, which is also the capital of the state of Amozanas. It’s good to come here to see the aborigines, the jungle, watch how the Rio Negro flows into the Amazon and feel like a pioneer.

In Peru The largest city on the Amazon - Iquitos, a city in the jungle, connected to civilization only by air and water transport. Houses on stilts, an Indian village, and high humidity can be a real test for a city dweller accustomed to comfort.

The Amazon is a South American river and is the deepest on the planet. In length it is second only to the Nile.

Together with tributaries, it accounts for a fifth of fresh water on the ground. It crosses the continent from east to west, and its basin is comparable in area to the Australian continent.

Story

The discoverer of the Amazon is considered to be the Spanish traveler and conquistador Francisco de Orellana, who in the 16th century sailed along it from its source to its mouth.

River on the map

The map shows that the river has a vast basin formed by numerous tributaries. Some of them are themselves large and deep rivers and have a length of more than one and a half thousand kilometers.

The Amazon basin is predominantly located in Brazil. Its western and southwestern parts belong to Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. The river and the tributaries that feed it form an extensive network water routes, the length of which is over 25 thousand kilometers.

The main channel is 4,300 km, including 1,690 km for the passage of ocean-going ships. This waterway is served by five major ports, four of which are located in Brazil. In the river delta, with an area of over a hundred thousand kilometers, there is one of the largest river islands on the planet - Marajo.

Characteristic

Being one of the most large rivers world, the Amazon has a length of over 6992 km.
When it receives its tributary, the Rio Negro, its width becomes more than five kilometers and its depth from 30 to 50 m.
Further, downstream, the width reaches eighty kilometers and the depth is 135 m.
At the mouth of the river, its width, taking into account the peculiarities of measurements, can range from 180 to 325 km.
The area of the river basin is 7,050,000 km2. River characteristics may vary depending on the season. The Amazon differs from other large rivers in that it is full of water all year round.
Significant factors in its nutrition are heavy rainfall and snowmelt in the upper reaches. The uniformity and abundance of nutrition largely depends on the location of tributaries in different hemispheres.
The lower part of the river experiences ocean tides that travel up the river for almost 1,400 km. When water rises, vast areas are flooded, forming floodplains tens of kilometers wide.
The current speed is five meters per second.
The climate is equatorial humid. Average annual temperature+25 0 C.
Average annual precipitation is 2000 - 3000mm.

Where does the Amazon flow?

The Amazon, mostly flowing through the lowland of the same name, flows into the Atlantic Ocean at the equator. At the same time, a huge amount of fresh water gets into it. According to scientists, even at a distance of over 60 kilometers from the coast, water in upper layers the ocean remains fresh. Important feature This mighty river flowing into the ocean is the formation of a huge delta area and many islands of various sizes.

Flora and fauna

The pool of this great river is distinguished by its unique flora and fauna, which are contained in the big world tropical rainforest, covering 5 million square kilometers.

A quarter of the substances used in the world for the production of medicines are extracted from plants in this forest. At the same time, scientists have studied only a third of the flora of the Amazon. In their opinion, in ten square kilometers of the Amazon tropics there are one and a half thousand species of flowering plants and several hundred species of trees.

The diversity of palm trees, fast-growing vines and a huge number of other unique plants is amazing.

More than two thousand fish live in the waters of the Amazon and its tributaries. The freshwater fish is able to bend its neck at a right angle, which allows it to hunt in flooded forests. This is where many come from aquarium fish. Here you can find fish that can exist without water, many predators, including.

Here lives something similar to guinea pig The world's largest rodent, the capybara, weighs 50 kilograms. The largest of the snakes, anacondas, and jaguars, which can swim, hunt on the banks of the river. In total, there are hundreds of species of mammals, birds, and other fauna in the river basin.

Sources and mouth of the Amazon

The second river in the world originates in the snow of the Peruvian mountains. Tons of melting snow turn into powerful streams that accelerate downward. The origins of the Amazon, the Maranyon and Ucayali rivers, flow through the mountain canyons of the mountain into a picturesque area in the Amazonian lowland.

What rivers flow into

Numerous tributaries flow into the Amazon, some of which are big rivers. A dozen of them have a length from one and a half thousand to 3,300 kilometers. These are rivers such as:

Madeira (3,250 km)
Purus (3,211 km)
Zhapura (2,820 km)
Tocantins (2,639 km)
Jurua (2,400 km)
Rio Negro (2,250 km)
Tapajos (1,992 km)
Xingu (1,979 km)
Ucayali (1,900 km)
Isa (1,575 km)
Marañon (1,415 km)

Climate

The climate in the Amazon basin is one of the wettest on Earth. Here the average annual precipitation is 2540 mm. Up to nine months of the year there are tropical downpours, which raise the water level in the river and its tributaries. It rises to one and a half tens of meters in May. When a flood begins, water floods hundreds of kilometers of forests. Trees many meters high are buried in it.

In September, the showers stop, the water subsides, and the sun appears. In November the rainy season begins again. The weather changes frequently, the warm sun that melts the snow in the mountains can quickly change into rain clouds. In evergreen tropical forest humid and hot. The temperature is 25-28 degrees, at night it does not drop below twenty.

There is no wind inside the forest, there is little light. The sun hardly penetrates through the dense foliage and dense interweaving of vines. You can only walk through the forest by cutting a road.

Attractions

Under the Amazon basin, at a depth of four kilometers, flows the Hamza, the longest underground river on a planet that is great depth flows into the Atlantic Ocean.
In the north of the river basin, huge deposits of bauxite, gold, manganese, copper and tin have been discovered, on the basis of which the Brazilian government is creating a mining center.
On the Amazon and its tributaries, 140 hydroelectric power stations have been built or are being built, the number of which will be tripled in the coming years.
A unique lily found on the river that can support the weight of a person.
The attraction of the river is its huge delta with one of the largest river islands on Earth.

Amazon River Delta

Flowing into the Atlantic Ocean, it brings twenty percent of all fresh water entering the oceans. The length from the main source of Marañon is 6437 km, from Apachet – 7000 km, from Ucayali more than 7000 km. In the last century, the Amazon and the Nile competed for the title of “longest”. Now the length of the Nile, according to various estimates, ranges from 5499 km to 6690 km. But there is no doubt that the Amazon is deeper.

At the driest time of the year, its width is 11 km, and total area water spaces reaches 110 thousand square kilometers. During the rainy season, the total area of water cover fluctuates around 350 thousand square kilometers, the average width of the river reaches 40 km, and the river mouth spreads up to 325 km wide and 135 m deep. About 40% of all water flows into the Amazon South America, including heavy tropical rains. The width and depth of the river mouth is so great that huge ocean-going ships can enter it along two-thirds of the entire length of the river.

Arapaima

But the Amazon is famous for more than just its size. For example, it is home to catfish, which in their usual habitats, slow rivers, lakes, rarely reach a length of more than one and a half meters and 30 kg of weight. Here they grow as much as nature will allow; sometimes you come across specimens weighing more than 90 kilograms. Round-fronted, with a curved beak and small eyes Amazonian dolphins– 2.5 meters long and weighing up to 200 kg. Also in the Amazon lives one of the largest freshwater fish - Arapaima, reaching 4 meters in length and weighing 200 kg. Due to its high commercial value, this species of fish is currently actively caught with harpoons and nets, and now it is difficult to find an Arapaima longer than 2 meters. , living in the Amazon, like catfish, also reach enormous sizes: up to 11 m in length and more than 500 kg in weight.

Amazon River (map)

What makes the Amazon the largest in the world?
The river is in tropical zone At the equator, where an average of 1016 cm of precipitation falls annually, this is 3 cm daily. The river basin can be imagined as a large saucer into which all the rainwater and small streams and rivers.

The Amazon basin, which contains the most significant forest areas on our planet, is divided between Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. These vast expanses feed numerous tributaries of the Amazon along its entire length through the rain jungle from the Andean heights to Atlantic coast. Such a significant part of the continent can be seen at a glance only from space.

About 1,100 large and small tributaries hide their channels under the cover of tropical jungle, crossing from the highlands and covering the Amazon basin with a dense network along its entire route. Of the many tributaries of the Amazon, 17 are more than 1,500 km long. Together with the Amazon, they contain about 20% of the total fresh water reserves on the planet. Since the area itself is relatively flat, the river beds that flow through it are quite shallow. On average, the Amazon bed drops by 5 mm for every kilometer - that is, no more than the water in the most ordinary bath! Most of the time, between 100,000 and 200,000 cubic meters are dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. m of fresh water depending on seasonal changes.

Majority major tributaries The Amazons got their name from the color of the water. For example, the water in the Rio Negro appears black, while in Madeira it appears golden-scarlet, reminiscent of the wine of the same name. Near Manaus in Brazil, the Rio Negro merges with the yellow ones, muddy waters Solimões, rushing from the slopes of the Andes. Two rivers, falling into one bed, behave for a long time as two immiscible liquids, and only after 80 km the yellow water of Solimões takes over.

The sources of Solimões, discovered only in 1971, are similar to the sources of all rivers in this system. They are located in the mountains of Peru and Ecuador and flow in a northwesterly direction towards Brazil. Along this route, the river manages to change its name six times, and its name is Solimões in the middle reaches. Only at the last, relatively straight line, accounting for about one-third of the total length, the river is called the Amazon.

The length of the Amazon is 6275 km, this is the longest long river in the world, incorporating many smaller rivers. During high water seasons, about 280,000 cubic meters flow through its bed. m of water per second. It is so deep that even ocean liners can safely ascend 3,700 km from its mouth. Thanks to this, they reach almost all corners of the northern part of the continent, right up to the Peruvian city of Iquitos, located in the heart of the rain jungle, where the railway has not yet reached.

Data

Location: The Amazon basin, which contains the most significant forest areas on our planet, is shared by Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia.
Area: Its area is 6.5 million square meters. km, which is 5% of the entire earth's land surface.
Length: The Amazon gets its name from its big river. The Amazon, having a length of 6275 km, a width of 5-12 km and a depth of 30-100 m.