It’s official. The Amazon is longer than the River Nile
IT IS the ultimate pub quiz question and has perplexed school children for generations.
But now it appears there might be a definitive answer to the question: ‘Which is the longest river in the world?’
In geography classes, children all over the world learn that the Nile, in Africa, is the world’s longest waterway.
However, scientists in Brazil are claiming to have established once and for all that the Amazon has snatched its title.
The Amazon is widely recognised as the world’s largest river by volume, but has been regarded as second in length to the River Nile in Egypt.
The revised claim follows an expedition to Peru that is said to have established a new starting point further south.
It puts the Amazon at 6,800km (4,250 miles) compared with the Nile’s 6,695km.
The precise length of a river is not easy to calculate and depends on correctly identifying the source and the mouth.
The new claim in Brazil follows an expedition by scientists which is said to have discovered a new source for the Amazon in the south of Peru and not the north of the country as had been thought for many years.
While the exact location has yet to be confirmed from two choices, scientists say either would make the river the longest in the world.
Guido Gelli, director of science at the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, told the Brazilian network TV Globo that today it could already be considered as a fact that the Amazon was the longest river in the world.
The Amazon is now said to begin in an ice-covered mountain in southern Peru called Mismi. Researchers travelled for 14 days, sometimes in freezing temperatures, to establish the location at an altitude of 5,000m.
There has been a healthy academic debate over the world’s longest river for some years and the claim from Brazil may not go unchallenged.
The latest findings back up the conclusions of a separate Pan-Amazon Project, developed by five scientists from the Remote Sensing Division of the Brazilian National Space Research Institute (INPE) .
Using satellite images from US space agency Nasa, they created a universal method for measuring riverbed lengths.
“We measured the Amazon and the Nile. There are final analyses to be done, but we can affirm that the former is longer than the latter,” study coordinator and geologist, Paulo Martini told Radiobrs, Brazil’s state news agency.
