The source of the Amazon River was just recently discovered. Why did it take so long?
Most of us has some degree of curiosity about where things start and end. The Amazon River is the world’s biggest river by far, in terms of the volume of water that reaches the sea, but only recently has its source been discovered. Rivers end when and where their mouths empty into a larger body of water, either another river, a bay, or an ocean. Knowing the location of a river’s mouth is, generally, pretty straightforward. On the other hand, finding the exact source of a river may require both legwork and modern mapping methods. In earlier times, mapping a river was especially useful for drawing up boundaries. For example, the Potomac River has been used as the boundary between Maryland and Virginia ever since they were first established as colonies. The source of the Potomac River, or its headwaters, is in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia (formerly Virginia), and it was traced by surveyors more than two hundred years ago, when the headwater’s area was still wilderness. Findi
