The muddy waters of the Amazon River
The muddy waters of the Amazon River. Today’s Image of the Day from NASA Earth Observatory shows sediment flowing from the Amazon River into the Atlantic Ocean.
The sediment, which is made up of soil, clay, and rocks, is what gives the water its muddy brown color.
According to NASA, 1.3 million tons of sediment make the journey across the Amazon River to the Atlantic Ocean every day.
Most of this sediment that has traveled from the foothills of the Andes Mountains in Peru and Bolivia. The muddy waters of the Amazon River
The image was captured on July 29, 2020 by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. The Amazon River in South America is the largest river by discharge volume of water in the world, and the disputed longest river in the world. The headwaters of the Apurímac River on Nevado Mismi had been considered for nearly a century as the Amazon’s most distant source, until a 2014 study found it to be the headwaters of the Mantaro River on the Cordillera Rumi Cruz in Peru.
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, they form what countries other than Brazil consider to be the main stem of the Amazon. Brazilians call this section the Solimões River above its confluence with the Rio Negro forming what Brazilians call the AmazonImage Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
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By Chrissy Sexton, Earth.com Staff Writer
