Week 3 The Amazon River

https://factslegend.org/20-interesting-amazon-river-facts/

So for spring break my friends and I traveled to Peru to see one of the wonders of the world in Latin America. We went and traveled through the Amazon Rain forest and they took us on a tour through the Amazon river. Some background information I learned about the Amazon river is that it is a perennial river and it is the largest drainage system in the world in terms of volumes of its flow and the area of its basin. From the tour guide I learned that the Amazon river is made up of meanders. Meanders are a series of sinuous curves, bends or winding in the river. The Amazons became a meander probably due to a big amount of sediment from external source like glacial or volcanic activity that was transported in suspension generally moving in the sweeping bends. Meanders also migrate laterally by eroding the outside of the bends and depositing sediment outside of the bends and depositing the sediment on the inside without appreciably changing their shape.  Through the ride, the tour guide pointed out some oxbow lakes to us. He said that they were formed from cutoff, which is when the river erode through the narrow neck of land, forming a new shorter channel segment. Also increased rainfall means that there is also an increase discharge of the rivers. The Amazon Basin, which is mostly flat, cannot contain that much water which results in water spills outside the riverbanks and into low floodplains and thus, new bodies of waters like oxbow lakes are created. We didn’t go all the way through the Amazon river, but the tour guide did mention to us that, as the Amazon river go towards the Atlantic ocean it becomes a braided channel. You can tell from the picture that the river was muddy which I suspect that the stream transport its load through suspension. The suspension is maintained through the turbulence in the flowing water and it usually consist of materials that are too large to be dissolved but too small to lie on the bed stream. Overall the trip was fantastic. I learned so much about the Amazon River that I come to appreciate this trip more. Hope you guys get to check it out! It truly deserves to be one of part of the wonders of the world.