More recently, all gazetteers and school textbooks reported that the longest river on our planet is the Nile. Today, scientists think differently and argue that the largest river in the world is the Amazon. According to them, there are several reasons for this. After the construction of the Aswan Dam in 1960, the Nile became shorter, and new studies and refinements made using satellite data showed that the Amazon with its source Ucayali has a total length of more than seven thousand kilometers, which is much longer than the Nile.
Amazon record highs
But the Amazon, in addition to the longest length, is the owner of several more records. It has the largest basin in terms of area - almost 7.2 million km2. And the Amazon is the most abundant river in the world. Due to the abundance of precipitation regularly falling around the equator over the vast territory of its basin, every hour it carries about 643 billion liters of fresh water into the Atlantic Ocean.
More than 500 tributaries flow into the Amazon. And many of them -large independent streams. The largest of the left tributaries is the Rio Negro, and the most significant of the right is the Madeira. If you add together the length of all the reservoirs of the basin, then their total length will exceed twenty-five thousand kilometers.
The largest river in the world at its confluence with Ucayali is 2 km wide, in the middle reaches - 5 km, and in the lower reaches - 15-20 km, and in some places it reaches 80 km. Sailing on a boat in the middle of the channel, you may not see the coast. The fact that you are still sailing along the river, and not along the sea, can only be determined by the color of the water. Due to the large amount of sand and silt in the water, it is yellow and cloudy.
The mouth of the Amazon is another record high. The width of the largest delta in the world reaches 325 kilometers. More than half the length of the channel from the Atlantic Ocean is navigable. So it turns out that in absolutely all respects, the Amazon is really the largest river in the world.
Amazon Beauty
Admiring the wild beauty and paying tribute to its mighty strength, the local Indians of the Amazon respectfully call the "Queen of Rivers". The rich and extremely diverse flora, the bright saturated colors of the equatorial forest, its yellow waters and the dark waters of its tributaries justify claiming that it is the most beautiful river in the world.
Only on its banks you can see such an amazing combination of unusual trees. Papaya is valued for its fruits, mahogany for its wood, cinchona for its bark, hevea for itsjuice from which rubber is made, and there is also a chocolate tree. And all this diversity is intertwined with vines, forming a solid green wall along the coast. And on the calm surface of the water in countless creeks and oxbows, the largest water lily in the world, Victoria Regia, sways, the leaves of which reach one and a half meters in diameter.
The largest river in the world is also famous for its unique fauna. More than 2,500 species of fish live in its murky waters, including the famous piranhas, river sharks, pink dolphins, giant rays, six-foot electric eels and bullfish.
