The Amazon River’s main outlets are the two channels north of Marajó Island, a lowland somewhat larger in size than Denmark, through a cluster of half-submerged islets and shallow sandbanks. There the mouth of the river is 40 miles (64 km) wide. The port city of Belém, Brazil, is on the deep water of the Pará River estuary south of Marajó. The Pará is fed chiefly by the Tocantins River, which enters the Pará southwest of Belém. The port city’s link with the main Amazon channel is either north along the ocean frontage of Marajó or following the deep but narrow furos (channels) of Breves that bound the island on the west and southwest and link the Pará River with the Amazon. There are more than 1,000 tributaries of the Amazon that flow into it from the Guiana Highlands, the Brazilian Highlands, and the Andes. Six of these tributaries—the Japurá (Caquetá in Colombia), Juruá, Madeira, Negro, Purus, and Xingu rivers—are each more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) long; the Madeira River exceeds 2,000 miles (3,200 km) from source to mouth. The largest oceangoing ships can ascend the river 1,000 miles to the city of Manaus, Brazil, while lesser freight and passenger vessels can reach Iquitos, Peru, 1,300 miles (2,090 km) farther upstream, at any time of year.

The sedimentary axis of the Amazon basin comprises two distinct groups of landforms: the várzea, or floodplain of alluvium of Holocene age (i.e., up to about 11,700 years old), and the terra firme, or upland surfaces of Pliocene and Pleistocene materials (those from 11,700 to 5,300,000 years old) that lie well above the highest flood level. The floodplain of the main river is characteristically 12 to 30 miles (19 to 50 km) wide. It is bounded irregularly by low bluffs 20 to 100 feet (6 to 30 metres) high, beyond which the older, undulating upland extends both north and south to the horizon. Occasionally these bluffs are undercut by the river as it swings to and fro across the alluvium, producing the terra caída, or “fallen land,” so often described by Amazon travelers. At the city of Óbidos, Brazil, where the river width is some 1.25 miles (2 km), a low range of relatively hard rock narrows the otherwise broad floodplain.

The streams that rise in the ancient crystalline highlands are classified as either blackwater (Jari, Negro, and Tocantins-Araguaia) or clearwater (Trombetas, Xingu, and Tapajós). The blackwater tributaries have higher levels of humic acids (which cause their dark colour) and originate in nutrient-poor, often sandy uplands, so they carry little or no silt or dissolved solids. Clearwater tributaries have a higher mineral content and lower levels of humic acids. Some rivers flow as clearwater during the rainy season and blackwater during the dry season. Where such blackwater tributaries enter the main river, they are sometimes blocked off to form funnel-shaped freshwater lakes or estuaries, as at the mouth of the Tapajós.

In contrast, the Madeira River, which joins the Amazon some 50 miles (80 km) downstream from Manaus, and its principal affluents—the Purus, Juruá, Ucayali, and Huallaga on the right or southern bank and the Japurá, Putumayo (Içá in Brazil), and Napo from the northwest—have their source in the geologically youthful and tectonically active Andes. There they pick up the heavy sediment loads that account for their whitewater designation. Where the silt-laden waters of the Amazon (Solimões in Brazil), derived from these streams, meet those of the Negro at Manaus, the darker and hence warmer and sediment-free waters of the latter tend to be overrun by those of the Amazon, creating a striking colour boundary that is erased by turbulence downstream.

The mother river, the Marañón above Iquitos, rises in the central Peruvian Andes at an elevation of 15,870 feet (4,840 metres) in a small lake in the Cordillera Huayhuash above Cerro de Pasco. The Huallaga and Ucayali, major right-bank affluents of the Marañón, originate considerably farther south. The headwaters of the deeply entrenched Apurímac and Urubamba, tributaries at the confluence of the Ucayali, reach to within 100 miles (160 km) of Lake Titicaca, the farthest of any stream in the system from the great river’s mouth.

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Water and its Varying Forms

The Negro River, the largest of all the Amazon tributaries, accounts for about one-fifth of the total discharge of the Amazon, and 40 percent of its aggregate volume is measured just below the confluence at Manaus. Its drainage area of about 292,000 square miles (756,000 square km) includes that of the Branco, its major left-bank tributary, with its source in the Guiana Highlands. Another of the Negro’s affluents, the Casiquiare, is a bifurcation of the Orinoco River; it forms a link between the Amazon and the Orinoco’s drainage system. The Branco watershed, approximately coincident with the state of Roraima, includes extensive tracts of sandy, leached soils that support a grassy and stunted arboreal cover (campos). Other tributaries of the Negro, such as the Vaupés and Guainía, drain eastward from the Colombian Oriente. The river traverses some of the least populous and least disturbed parts of the Amazon basin, including several national parks, national forests, and indigenous reserves. In its lower reaches the Negro becomes broad and island-filled, reaching widths of up to 20 miles (32 km) in certain locations.

The Madeira River, the second largest affluent of the Amazon, has a discharge of perhaps two-thirds that of the Negro. Silt from its turbid waters has choked its lower valley with sediments; where it joins the Amazon below Manaus, it has contributed to the formation of the 200-mile- (320-km-) long island of Tupinambarana. Beyond its first cataract, 600 miles (970 km) up the river, its three major affluents—the Madre de Dios, the Beni, and the Mamoré—provide access to the rubber-rich forests of the Bolivian Oriente; the meandering Purus and Juruá rivers that flank the Madeira on the west are also important tributaries that lead into those forests. Mamoré’s tributary, the Guaporé, opens up to the Mato Grosso Plateau.