Thursday, April 10, 2008

A quick look at the largest and smallest River

Longest River, the Nile and the Amazon can both be called the longest river in the world depending on how you define longest. With several mouths, the exact point at which the Amazon ends continues to be uncertain. Counting the Para's estuary (the most distant mouth), the Amazon's length is approximately 4,190 miles. Once officially recorded as having a length of 4,145 miles, the Nile has since lost a few miles due to the formation of Lake Nasser behind the Aswan High Dam.
Deepest Lake, is Lake Baikal in Siberia, Russia. The Olkhon Crevice, the deepest point of the lake, has a depth of 5,370 ft, of which 3,875 are below sea level.
Biggest Lake, is the Caspian Sea, an inland sea which covers parts of Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Iran. It is 760 miles long, with a surface area of 143,560 miles and an estimated volume of 21,500 cubic miles.
Biggest Ocean Covering 32.6% of the Earth's surface or 64,186,300 miles, the Pacific Ocean is officially the world's biggest ocean.
Smallest Ocean, more than ten times smaller than the Pacific Ocean, the Arctic Ocean, which has a surface area of 5,105,700 miles, is the world's smallest ocean.
Biggest Lake Shrinkage Due almost entirely to the extraction of water for irrigation purposes, the Aral Sea has shrunk the most in recent times having lost almost two-thirds of its original size. By 1994 (with 10,500 miles left compared to 26,300 miles in 1950) it had divided into two smaller bodies of water.