Amazon Trivia | 30 facts about the largest river in the world

Amazon is the largest river in the world, whereas the Nile river is considered the longest river in the world.

Let’s find out more about the Amazon River!

1. The Amazon River is located in South America.
2. It is the largest river by discharge volume of water in the world.
3. It’s the disputed longest river in the world.
4. The headwaters of the Apurímac River on Nevado Mismi had been considered for nearly a century as the Amazon’s most distant source.
5. In a 2014 study it found that Amazon is the headwaters of the Mantaro River on the Cordillera Rumi Cruz in Peru.
6. The Mantaro and Apurímac rivers join, and with other tributaries form the Ucayali River, which in turn meets the Marañón River upstream of Iquitos, Peru, forming what countries other than Brazil consider to be the main stem of the Amazon.
7. Brazilians call this section the Solimões River above its confluence with the Rio Negro forming what Brazilians call the Amazon at the Meeting of Waters at Manaus.
8. This is the largest city on the river.
9. Amazon River has a discharge of about 209,000 cubic metres per second.
10. This approximately 6,591 cubic kilometres per annum (1,581 cu mi/a), greater than the next seven largest independent rivers combine.
11. Yhe Amazon represents 20% of the global riverine discharge to the ocean.
12. The Amazon basin is the largest drainage basin in the world, with an area of approximately 7,000,000 square kilometres (2,700,000 sq mi)
13. The portion of the river’s drainage basin in Brazil alone is larger than any other river’s basin.
14. The Amazon enters Brazil with only one-fifth of the flow it finally discharges into the Atlantic Ocean.
15. It yet already has a greater flow at this point than the discharge of any other river.
16. The Amazon was initially known by Europeans as the Marañón, and the Peruvian part of the river is still known by that name today.
17. It later became known as Rio Amazonas in Spanish and Portuguese, and Amazon River in English.
18. The name Rio Amazonas was reportedly given after native warriors attacked a 16th-century expedition by Francisco de Orellana.
19. The warriors were led by women, reminding de Orellana of the Amazon warriors, a tribe of women warriors related to Iranian Scythians and Sarmatians mentioned in Greek mythology.
20. The word Amazon itself may be derived from the Iranian compound *ha-maz-an- “(one) fighting together” or ethnonym *ha-mazan- “warriors”, a word attested indirectly through a derivation, a denominal verb in Hesychius of Alexandria’s gloss (“hamazakaran: ‘to make war’ in Persian”), where it appears together with the Indo-Iranian root *kar- “make” (from which Sanskrit karma is also derived).
21. However, other scholars insist that the name is derived from the Native American word amassona, meaning “boat destroyer.
22. Recent geological studies suggest that for millions of years the Amazon River used to flow in the opposite direction – from east to west.
23. Eventually the Andes Mountains formed, blocking its flow to the Pacific Ocean, and causing it to switch directions to its current mouth in the Atlantic Ocean.
24. After starting its seemingly slow and subtle voyage in the highlands of Peru, the Amazon River traverses through Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela before entering Brazil and flowing out of its Atlantic coast.
25. The most established visiting hot-spots are in Peru (Iquitos and Puerto Maldonado), Ecuador (Coca), Brazil (Manaus) and Bolivia (Rurrenabaque).
26. Martin Strel , a Slovenian athlete, once swam almost the entire length of the Amazon River, in 66 days
27. Already a veteran of the sport, which saw him complete swims along the Danube, the Mississippi, the Parana and the Yangtze rivers, Strel swam a total of 5,268km (of the Amazon’s entire 6,400km-length), a distance which is actually greater than the width of the Atlantic Ocean.
28. Researchers discovered an entire coral reef system at the Amazon River Delta in 2016
29. The Amazon River itself and all its countless tributaries comprise an ecosystem all their own, home to more than 2,000 species of fish and more than 400 amphibians.
30. There are no bridges built across the Amazon River