Wednesday, August 22, 2012

The Amazon pours so much water into the Atlantic that freshwater

The Amazon pours so much water into the Atlantic that freshwater can be found so far offshore that there isn't any land in sight.

The Amazon River is the second longest river in the world, dwarfed only by the Nile. It’s 4,080 miles long and runs from the Andes Mountains in Peru all the way through Brazil to the Atlantic Ocean. It contains more water than any other river in the world. Not just mor
e than the Nile, but more than the Nile, Mississippi, and Yangtze combined. In one second, the Amazon pours more than 55 million gallons of fresh water into the ocean.

That’s so much fresh water that it dilutes the ocean’s saltines for 100 miles- meaning the fresh water is so far out that you can be sitting in it and unable to see the land. The Amazon actually provides 20% of the world’s fresh water supply, making it extremely important. The Amazon is much wider than the Nile, and during the wet season can reach 40 kilometers in length.

Where it meets the Atlantic, it can be as wide as 325 kilometers- and it grows by 2 meters a year. There are even 2,000 species that live in its rivers. It’s pretty amazing what can be said about one river.

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