Amazon Basin

The Amazon Basin is home to the largest rainforest on the planet. The Amazon River is the largest river by volume in the world, made possible by the near daily rains. The river mouth is 200 miles wide (close to the distance between Nashville and Memphis). The depth of the river is phenomenal because rushing water scours out the bottom of the riverbed. Freshwater still occurs 200 miles from where the river discharges into the Atlantic Ocean. Iquitos is just on the eastern side of the Andes and serves as a port city for Peru. The fact that a port city can be 2,000 miles inland shows the great depth and length of the Amazon. It is both deep and wide enough to support ocean-going vessels. This is all possible because the rainfall is more the 300" annually, and more than 200 rivers feed into the Amazon system.