“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.” – Antony and Cleopatra, Act II, Scene 2
Amazon realities are as fantastic as her myths.
The river system is by far the largest body of fresh water in the world, 14 times the volume of the Mississippi and accounting for about one-fifth of all the fresh water on the earth’s surface. At its mouth, the Amazon is more than 200 miles (320 kilometers) wide. Ship-board travelers are often unable to see either bank, creating the sensation of a vast inland sea which so impressed early Amazon explorers. The Amazon is so deep, up to 130 meters (425 feet), that ocean-going vessels can steam 2,300 miles upstream to Iquitos in Peru. But the Amazon River is only half the story. Besides the Amazon itself, there are some 1,100 tributaries, including 17 that are more than 1,000 miles long. Any one of these—the Madeira, the Purus, the Juruá—would itself be one of the world’s great rivers.
And the Amazon is immensely potent, its muddy current pushing a great brown stain 200 miles into the Atlantic at its mouth and its waters often roaring and foaming as they thrust into the sea. At its flood, the Amazon can rise as much as 65 feet; annually, it carries 160 million metric tons of silt to the sea buoyed by a stream of 200,000 cubic meters (11 million cubic feet) of water per second.
Twice a month, at the new and then at the full moon, the river currents crash into the rising Atlantic tide to shape water towers as high as six meters followed by a rushing tidal bore, a wave of seawater reversing the river’s flow for hundreds of miles upstream. The phenomenon, known as the pororoca, is especially severe when sea tides are at their most volatile during the vernal and then the autumnal equinox. The word pororoca derives from the pre-Columbian Tupi language and means “thunder” or “roar.”
World’s Largest Rainforest
But the river is only part of the story.
The Biblical waters of the Amazon and its tributaries push and pour their way through a green canopy of vast proportions. The Amazon rainforest is verdant, mysterious, and fantastically eclectic. Amazonia is by far the world’s largest rainforest, covering about 2.7 million square miles (7.0 million square kilometers) over nine countries. Brazil accounts for about 70% of the total.
To date, 80,000 plant species, including 176 orchid varieties, 15,000 land animal species, including 2,500 snakes, 2,500 bird types, at least 3,000 varieties of fish, and as many as 15,000 insect species, many of them as deadly as the infamous saca-saia marching ants that destroy everything in their path, have been scientifically identified as inhabitants of the Amazon’s dense ecosystem.
But much more, when it comes to flora and fauna, is still to be found and cataloged. It is thought the Amazon is host to a million or more plant and animal species. Many are unique to the rainforest and more are being discovered every year. There are 118 different hummingbird species alone, many of them added to the list only in recent years. Monkeys come in 38 different varieties, wasps in 226. The river harbors majestic pink dolphins while, in the rainforest canopy, the sparrow-like jurutai sings like a flute.
Nor has the entire Amazon been thoroughly explored by land as yet (although satellite mapping has advanced rapidly in recent years). As recently as 1913, former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt could explore an unknown region penetrated by a river whose existence was purely conjectural and discover an Amazon tributary nearly a thousand miles long. That river, previously known as the River of Doubt, was rechristened Rio Roosevelt in honor of the intrepid ex-president, whose life was probably shortened by a bout of malaria he suffered during the journey.
But even such heroic and apparently exhaustive expeditions are inadequate to the task of thorough-going Amazon exploration. The geography of the Amazon is constantly, often rapidly, changing. In 1830, for example, a convoy of five Portuguese trading vessels anchored off Santarem, 500 miles from the mouth of the Amazon, was simply washed away by an unstable “grass” island, or “terra caida,” which had been uprooted by powerful river currents. Even today, these “ghost islands,” known to suddenly break off from the riverbank with a sound like thunder, can swiftly alter the Amazon’s shape to the point where navigational charts are only thought to be valid for 20 to 30 years.
A Glimpse at the Heart of Darkness
And then there is the jungle, described by early travelers as “The Great, Green Hell,” a vast heart of darkness so overgrown and dim that, during Rubber Boom days, collectors of the precious latex often used lanterns while tramping through the rainforest even at high noon.
Yet despite the Amazon’s seemingly limitless variety, famed naturalist Louis Agassiz, in one more Amazon paradox, could describe traveling through its mazes as “dull and wearisome monotony.” Brazilian engineer Alberto Rangel, in his 1908 classic Inferno Verde (Green Hell), wrote, “The jungle is so dense it gives you the depressing feeling of having no opening, no relief at all, like being buried alive.” In yet another paradox, Rangel noted that, at noon, the jungle is often bathed in silence, coming alive with a bizarre, and sometimes frightening, cacophony only at night.
As Brazilian engineering executive Sérgio Quintella, former president of the sprawling Jari paper and pulp project in the Amazon, said in a 1980s interview, “After one year in the Amazon, I felt I had only just begun to scratch the surface.”
-Thomas Murphy, 2026
Photo Credits: Jlwad, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: River_RP.jpg; Jorge Andrade, https://www.flickr.com/photos/jorgebrazi/5716063584
Coming Next Month: America at 250: Promises to Keep
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