When I was young (I think I was 18 years old), me and my dad traveled across all the length of Amazon river (from Belém to Manaus) in a crowded boat sleeping on hammocks, it was a 6 days trip. https://goo.gl/maps/BFkCPx1HR1n
In some places the river was really narrow and almost could be crossed by swimming, but there where times that I couldn't see any of the two margins because of its enormous width.
The river is / was the main highway, not sure about now with more year round roads etc, but when I was last in the area, long time ago now mind,you would just turn up and get on the boat.
It wasn't comfortable, wasn't all that enjoyable after (x) hours and (y) days.
Lots of being bored, interspersed with the odd enjoyable / memorable moments. Which looking back on, is all you remember :)
Always happy when bridges get discussed here. Having built (a couple of) bridges across the Mississippi, i can attest that it is possible to build a bridge across the Amazon. This headline is appears to be click bait
A river rising 30 feet is no big deal. I think the Amazon rises more than that actually. The Mississippi very often rises to 40 feet.More in some years. Here's a video of a 300yr flood hitting in the middle of bridge construction - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orj6B46PJbY (skip and pause at 0:17)
>the river rises thirty feet, and crossings that were once three miles wide can balloon to thirty miles in a matter of weeks.
My impression wasn't so much that it was the 30 feet rise, but the fact that it added 27 miles to the width of the river. Does the Mississippi do that as well? (The Ohio/Monongahela/Allegheny are my baseline, so it's harder to comprehend rivers that do stuff like this!)
This is also hardly an issue, as there are bridges longer than that [0].
As others have pointed out, the main issue is given at the end of the article: nobody needs such a bridge.
> But the real reason for the lack of bridges is simply this: the Amazon Basin has very few roads for bridges to connect. The dense rainforest is sparsely populated outside of a few large cities, and the river itself is the main highway for those traveling through the region.
The Mississippi would, but doesn't to that scale today, because the Army Core has leveed/dyked in most places.
You can see in the pictures here http://bit.ly/2u7f2ta that there is a lot of "marsh" beyond where the river bank ends. You just have to extend the roadway as far as you like. You can see how the bridge extends beyond the river on both sides.
This particular bridge for example has 18 miles of approach roadways. Only about 1600 feet of that, spans the Mississippi.
In short, if flooding adds 27 miles or 270 miles of width, the engineering is pretty much the same. You just have to know, where to start and finish :-)
The place where I was surprised to learn there's no bridge is between Kinshasa and Brazzaville, capital cities of their respective countries, with populations of about 11 million and 2 million people.
I've then heard that the lack of a bridge may be more due to politics than to engineering problems, but how hard do you think it would be to bridge the Congo in that area?
>For most of its length, the Amazon isn't anywhere close to too wide to bridge—in the dry season. But during the rainy season, the river rises thirty feet, and crossings that were once three miles wide can balloon to thirty miles in a matter of weeks. The soft sediment that makes up the river bank is constantly eroding, and the river is often full of debris, including floating vegetation islands called matupás, which can measure up to 10 square acres. It's a civil engineer's worst nightmare.
Isn't this the predominance of what the ACE (Army Corps of Engineers) deals with when it comes to the Mississippi River[0]?
I think square acres might work as the article could be referring to the area moment of inertia of the floating vegetation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_moment_of_area). I suspect this is not the intended meaning though. :)
What does work have to do with any of this? Sure, the water acts on the floating vegetation in the direction of displacement, but without a measure of the weight of the islands, it's somewhat meaningless.
The Amazon pushes a tremendous amount of fresh water into the ocean:
>The river pushes a vast plume of fresh water into the ocean. The plume is about 400 kilometres (250 mi) long and between 100 and 200 kilometres (62 and 124 mi) wide. For centuries ships have reported fresh water near the Amazon's mouth yet well out of sight of land in what otherwise seemed to be the open ocean.
like some countries/societies jumped straight into cell/smartphones by-passing the landline stage, i think such areas like Amazon should and would go straight the way of "flying car" (all those multi-copters popping around e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNxoHqZGYa0 - just add ICE/hybrid generator for range and tilt-able ducts for safety). Much less environmental damage, cheaper than whole road infrastructure and much faster to cover those distances.
Skipping the landline stage means skipping the need to stabilize the situation on the ground, particularly involving crime. There is a lot to be said for the side-effects of landlines, other utilities, a postal service, roads, and so on. Widely exposed public assets need protection, and so they get it, and thus the place is becalmed.
Cell towers are tiny little spots that can be fortified without much concern for the surrounding situation. They don't provide an incentive to care about any troubles in the area.
Do you have a source for that showing causation? Also I don't recall the Amazon area or any of the remote parts of Brazil I've been to having a problem with stability or crime. The crime is in the cities. Where landlines run underground anyway and don't need to be secured.
Anyone who lives along the Amazon uses boat to get around it. It's not that the river is stopping travel. It's just that they don't use cars to cross it.
cesnas are usually a prefered method of transport and there a lot of places who own an airstrip. Much like alaska, where is very common to have an hidro or bush plane.
If they did build one, it’s quite likely, as feared by some, to result in increased human activity in the vecinity of the basin. That’s to say, expect some clearing of parts of the forest.
That article reflects similar lessons learned in Netherland: rivers need space to expand. We've got a long and treasured history turning lakes and seas into land (polder), but recently, and somewhat controversially, we've started abandoning a few polders in order to give floods a better place to go than population centers.
At the moment, you definitely can't cross the Amazon by bridge, because no bridge exists. Whether it's possible to build a bridge is a different question.
At least in Brazil, it's not considered truly the Amazon until the Rio Solimões and Rio Negro combine, which makes sense, as they are the two enormous tributaries that combine to form the mega-river. You're splitting hairs here, of course the tributaries have bridges across them.
That said I do agree that the whole premise of the article is pretty dumb, considering the Brazilians fairly easily (minus graft) built a bridge across the Rio Negro right before it becomes the Amazon. If they wanted to, they could do it after as well.
I really respect the work you've put in here, but all of those appear to be on the Apurimac River, a tributary of a tributary of a tributary of the Amazon.
In some places the river was really narrow and almost could be crossed by swimming, but there where times that I couldn't see any of the two margins because of its enormous width.
Is was a really great experience, got to talk to indigenous people, saw a lot of botos cor-de-rosa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_river_dolphin) and got to eat amazing local dishes.