Allan Pages age 10, of St. Catherines, Ontario, for the question:
How big is the Amazon?
The Nile, the Mississippi Missouri and the Amazon are each about 4,000 miles long and no one can say for sure which is the longest river in the world. But there are other ways to measure the size of a stream or a great river system. One of them is the flow, the volume of water drained and discharged into the sea. Here the Amazon is without question champion of the world. It pours more water into the ocean than the Nile and the Mississippi combined plus the Yangtze river thrown in for good measure.
The source of the mighty river trickles down from glacial lakes in the lofty Andes, only 75 miles from the Pacific Ocean. It flows due east gathering up the waters from about 1,100 tributaries and empties itself into the Atlantic at the equator. From source to mouthy the mighty stream is about 3900 miles long and, with its tributaries, it drains one third of the subcontinent of South America an area of about two and a half million square miles.
About 2000 miles from its mouth, the tremendous river is already almost two miles wide. As it goes on its way, gathering waters from the north and the south, it gets deeper. It is 100 feet deep when still 1000 miles from the sea. At 750 miles from the sea it is 175 feet deep. During the seasons of high watery ocean vessels can sail up the Amazon from the Atlantic 2300 miles to Peru.
At its mouthy the mighty river is 60 miles wide and it sweeps its fresh waters 100 miles or more out into the salty Atlantic. The mouth of the Amazon is an enormous delta region because of the impact of the flow of fresh water into the salty sea on its long journey, the river and its network of streams gather up mud silt and topsoil. It is estimated that 160 million tons of this debris is dumped into the delta every year he climate along
The climate along the course of the Amazon is wet and hot, Moat of the main stream flows through dense tropical rain forests. This is a region of steaming heat thronged with swarms of hungry gaudy flowers and treacherous snakes. There are also malaria and other diseases dangerous to human life. An area more than half of the United States is still unexplored and likely to remain so. As far as we knows only a few scattered tribes of Indians are able to cope with life in the hazardous rain forests of the Amazon.
The bungle may be unfriendly to man, but it is certainly not unkind to plant life. Here in these steamy forests there is a greater variety of plant life than in any place on earth, The Amazon river itself holds more types of fish than any stream on earth,