Flowing over 6450 kilometers eastward across Brazil, the Amazon River originates in the Peruvian
Andes as tiny mountain streams that eventually combine to form one of the world's mightiest rivers. This
image of the Amazon's mouth was captured by MISR's vertical-viewing (nadir) camera on September 8,
2000 during Terra orbit 3862. The image is approximately 380 kilometers in width.
While the Amazon is surpassed in length by the Nile, it carries the largest volume of freshwater in the
world, accounting for nearly 20 percent of the Earth's discharge into the oceans. Millions of cubic feet of
water empty into the Atlantic every second, and the effluent is transported to very large distances from
shore.
MISR was built and is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, for NASA's Office of
Earth Science, Washington, DC. The Terra satellite is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center,
Greenbelt, MD. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology.
Image credit: NASA/GSFC/JPL, MISR Team.
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