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Facts About The Amazon

The river is located in northern South America, largely in Brazil, ranked as the largest in the world in terms of watershed area, number of tributaries, and volume of water discharged. Measuring 6,400 km (4,000 mi) from source to mouth, it is second in length only to the Nile among the rivers of the world. With its hundreds of tributaries, the Amazon drains a territory of more than 7 million sq km (2.7 million sq mi), roughly half of which is in Brazil; the rest is in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela. It is estimated that the Amazon discharges between 34 million and 121 million liters (9 million and 32 million gallons) of water per second and deposits a daily average of 3 million tons of sediment near its mouth. The annual outflow from the river accounts for one-fifth of all the fresh water that drains into the oceans of the world. The outpouring of water and sediment is so vast that the salt content and color of the Atlantic Ocean are altered for a distance of about 320 km (about 200 mi) from the mouth of the river.

The Amazon was probably first seen by Europeans in 1500 when the Spanish commander Vicente Yáñez Pinzón explored the lower part. Real exploration of the river came with the voyage of the Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana down from the Napo in 1540-41; his fanciful stories of female warriors gave the river its name. Not long afterward (1559) the Spanish conquistador Pedro de Ursúa led an expedition down from the Marañón River. In 1637-38 the Portuguese explorer Pedro Teixeira led the voyage upstream that definitively opened the Amazon to world knowledge. The river continued to be of enormous importance to explorers and naturalists, among them Charles Darwin and Louis Agassiz.

Geologically, the Amazon basin is a sediment-filled structural depression between crystalline highlands of Brazil and Guiana. The riverbed is in a wide floodplain that is up to 30 mi (48 km) wide. For much of its course, the Amazon wanders in a maze of brownish channels amid countless islands, but is unobstructed by falls.

Its headstreams, however, arise cold and clear in the heights of the Andes. They descend northward before turning east to join and form the Amazon (which is, however, occasionally called the Solimões from the Brazilian border to the junction with the Rio Negro). Of the Amazon's more than 500 tributaries, the chief ones are the Negro, Japurá, Putumayo, and Napo, which enter from the north; and the Javari, Juruá, Purús, Madeira, Tapajós, and Xingú rivers, which enter from the south. The Casiquiare River, a natural canal, links the Amazon basin with the Orinoco basin.

Popular places to travel in the Amazon:

Manaus: The most common, although perhaps not the best, jumping-off point for excursions into the Amazon.
Teatro Amazonas: The city's most potent symbol is the Teatro Amazonas, the famous opera house designed by Domenico de Angelis in Italian Renaissance style at the height of the rubber boom, in 1896.
Forest: The forest still keeps many of its secrets: to this day, major tributaries of the Amazon are unexplored. Of the estimated 15,000 species of Amazon creatures, thousands of birds and fish and hundreds of mammals have not been classified.
The Amazon Basin: It is almost impossible to fathom the vast dimensions of the Amazon Basin. Looking at a map of South America-the entire northern half of which is covered with forests, swamps and rivers-makes it no easier to comprehend. Statistical superlatives might help: The 4,200-mile-long superhighway known as the Amazon River forms the backbone of this enormous wilderness, home to the most biologically diverse wildlife on Earth. More species of primates have been recorded here than anywhere else in the New World.