Have you ever wondered why the Amazon River is difficult to cross? The answer is incredibly simple!
Why is the Amazon River difficult to cross? The answer has to do with bridges.
Better said, with their absence. There is no bridge connecting the two banks of the river, as it were notes Britannica.
Why is the Amazon River difficult to cross?
The Amazon, in South America, is probably the longest river in the world. The Amazon boasts a huge jungle basin, spectacular waterfalls, and the world’s largest river dolphins, but perhaps most notably, there’s something it lacks: bridges. The Amazon is the longest river in the world that is not crossed by any bridge.
The Amazon stretches over 6,900 kilometers from its headwaters in the Andes to its vast delta in the Atlantic Ocean. The approximately 25 million people who live on or near its shores in Brazil, Peru and Colombia live either in big cities or in small tribal villages, but they have one thing in common: to cross to the other side, you have to to get on a boat or ferry. There is no road that crosses the Amazon, practically splitting the entire continent in two.
Why are there no bridges over the Amazon?
For most of its length, the Amazon is not too wide to cross, at least in the dry season. But during the rainy season, the river’s level rises by more than 9 meters, and passages that were once 5 kilometers wide can reach 50 kilometers in a matter of weeks. The river banks, made up of soft sediment, are constantly eroding and the river is often littered with debris, including floating islands of vegetation called matupáswhich can have up to 4 hectares. For an engineer, the Amazon is a real nightmare.
But the main reason for the lack of bridges is simple: the Amazon basin has very few roads that could be connected by them. Outside of a few large cities, the dense rainforest is sparsely populated, and the river itself is the main “highway” for those traveling through the region. Macapá, a city of half a million inhabitants located on the northern shore of the Amazon delta, has no road connecting it to the rest of Brazil. If you rent a car there, the only direction you can go is north towards French Guiana, according to Condé Nast Traveler.
For years, ferry traffic between Manaus and its neighboring town of Iranduba has been slow and increasingly congested. The crossing cost up to $30 per person. So in 2010, Brazil built a suspension bridge of more than 3 kilometers connecting the two cities. This bridge does not actually cross the main stream of the Amazon, but the Rio Negro, its largest tributary. Still, this is the first bridge in the Amazon hydrographic system, and residents celebrated. However, the bridge and highway projects in Manaus are not well viewed by environmentalists. In the past, building roads in the Amazon was the first step towards deforestation.
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Source: www.descopera.ro
