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Brazil: Physical

Brazil: Physical. Brazil has an amazing variety of contrasting landscapes. That is not surprising, in such a vast country.

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Brazil: Physical

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  1. Brazil: Physical Brazil has an amazing variety of contrasting landscapes. That is not surprising, in such a vast country. There are rainforests and semi-deserts, enormous rivers and magnificent waterfalls, coastal plains and palm-fringed tropical beaches, wide savannas, vast highlands and high mountains.

  2. The Brazilian Highlands dominate the southeastern part of Brazil. They are like a row of tables all tilted away from the Atlantic coast. Inland, the Highlands gradually slope down to the other main landscape feature of Brazil, the Amazon basin, an area of 4,000,000 square kilometres. The edge facing the ocean is called the ‘Great Escarpment’. It is very steep and rises from sea level to 2,500 metres. There is only a narrow coastal plain.

  3. A river basin (sometimes called its ‘catchment’) is all the land drained by a river system. The Amazon basin is enormous, the largest in the world in terms of the quantity of water that drains through it. The Amazon is the second longest river in the world after the Nile in Africa. Look at the map and you can see just how large the Amazon basin is compared with the other drainage basins of Brazil. They are not small by any means but are completely dwarfed by that of the mighty Amazon.

  4. The Amazon and its basin has all the features of a typical river valley although on a grand scale. For example, its flood plain in places is 100 kilometres wide with river cliffs 300 feet high. The river is navigable by ocean-going steamers as far as Iquitos in Peru, 3,885 kilometres from the river mouth. More than half of Brazil (56%) is drained by the Amazon and its tributaries. The Amazon is 6,577 kilometres long with over half its length (3,615 kilometres) in Brazil. The Amazon in Flood

  5. This is how a British travel brochure describes the Iguaçu Falls in Brazil’s south: ‘You need a full day to savour the breath-taking spectacle of the Iguaçu Falls. View their sheer immensity over 275 separate cataracts emptying 4.5 million litres of water every second into the foaming Parana River. It is a sight to make Niagara or Victoria Falls look insignificant by comparison.’

  6. The Iguaçu Falls were created as the river flowed over a layer of hard rock which in turn overlaid easily eroded soft rock. The hard overlying rock is continually being undermined and the waterfall continues to move upstream.

  7. The Iguaçu Falls in Brazil’s south

  8. The longest river wholly within Brazil is the São Francisco, which flows over 1,600 kilometres northward before turning east into the Atlantic. • With the exception of the Amazon, few of the larger Brazilian rivers are very good for navigation. • Many of the rivers flowing to Brazil’s Atlantic coast are very short and are broken by waterfalls and rapids. • Many of the rivers in the Paraná River drainage basin rise close to the Atlantic coast but flow west then south, often tumbling over spectacular waterfalls, before turning west to reach the sea through the River Plate between Argentina and Uruguay. • Engineers are now planning to link the Amazon, Parana and Orinoco basins to create one vast network of navigable waterways. This will transform river transport within Brazil and between Brazil and other South American countries.

  9. This photograph shows the city of Rio de Janeiro on Brazil’s Atlantic coast. You can see how the ‘Great Escarpment’ - the edge of the Brazilian Highlands - meets the sea. Very steep mountains come down to the sea leaving very little flat land for building or farming. Some of the mountains, like the Sugarloaf, are the remains of very old and ancient mountain ranges. At some points on the coast where the sea has created bays, important settlements and ports have developed. It is difficult to build roads from the coastal plain up and over the Great Escarpment.

  10. North of Rio from Salvador to Fortaleza, the coast is very different. This is ‘the Golden Coast’. There are 3,480 kilometres of ‘lively beaches, deserted beaches, beaches with dunes, beaches with coloured sand.

  11. But beyond the beautiful beaches of north east Brazil, the coast changes and there is a complete contrast. There the Amazon meets the sea. The Amazon splits into just two main channels. The force of its current is such that it can push its silt several hundred kilometres out into the Atlantic.

  12. In the south, the coast is low-lying and swampy with lagoons, sand dunes and sand spits.

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