Fluid facts

World's widest river
The Amazon River is so wide that from its mouth pours one- fifth of all the moving fresh water  on Earth. In addition to being the widest river, the Amazon also has the distinction of being probably the longest ( estimates vary up to 4,200 miles), covering the largest area (2,7720,000 square miles), and having the greatest discharge (7,200,000 cubic feet per second). The area drained by it is almost as great as the area of the entire United States.

Largest landlocked water
The largest landlocked body of water in the world is the Caspian Sea. It receives the Volga River (the longest in Europe) and has an area of 154,000 square miles. It has no outlet, so it collects salt and is two-fifths as salty as the oceans. Its level--and thus its area--has been fluctuating over the centuries. In recent years it has been shrinking, but current engineering plans may make it rise soon, artificially, by making water flow from the Vychegda and Pechora Rivers into the Volga--a gigantic feat.

Deepest part of the ocean
The deepest part of the oceans is farther below sea level than the highest land is above it. The Mariana Trench, a great fissure in the floor of the Pacific Ocean, reaches a depth of 36,198 feet at its lowest measured point, just off the Philippines. Mount Everest, considered to be the world's highest mountain, which dominates the Himalayan chain on the Nepal-Tibet border, is "only" 29,028 feet high.

Deepest lake
The deepest lake in the world--it is nearly a mile deep in places--is Lake Baikal, in Siberia. Though Lake Superior covers a greater area--32,000 square miles to Baikal's 13,000--it contains less water. Lake Baikal represents the largest single volume of fresh water in the world.

Source of the River Nile
Though the 4,157-mile-long Nile was all-important to Egypt, European and American explorers, and not Egyptians, were the first to trace the Nile all the way to its sources. In 1857, the Englishman John Hanning Speke reached a great equatorial lake that he named Lake Victoria, for his Queen. Many rivers flowed into the lake from the mountains of Kenya, near the central East Africa coast, but the Nile issued from Victoria.