An article conducted by researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPS) from NASA and recently published in the journal Nature Geosciencecarried out a global count of the amount of water in the Earth’s rivers. The team estimated the total volume of fresh water present in rivers between 1980 and 2009, and mapped the results for the planet’s major hydrological regions.
According to this estimate, the largest freshwater deposit in a river is found in Brazil. The researchers looked at how much water some river basins receive and how much ends up in the oceans. With this, they created two maps. The first one below shows the amount of storage by hydrologic regions that contain one or more river basins. Darker shades of blue represent larger deposits.
The Amazon basin, or Amazon River basin, is located in several countries in South America. It is the largest river basin in the world and the one with the highest water density. It has a surface area of approximately 7.05 million square kilometers (approximately 4 million are in Brazilian territory) and has great potential for electricity generation.
As you can see, the Amazon basin is the region with the largest river storage, holding about 850 cubic kilometers of water – about 38% of the global estimate. It is also possible to see the amount of water in other river basins in Brazil, such as in the Northeast and South regions.
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The Amazon basin is of great importance as it supplies the cities and coastal populations, its water is used for domestic activities, agriculture and local livestock, but also for the production of electricity for immediate consumption in cities and for livestock farming.
The study also mapped and quantified the flow of water from rivers to oceans, as shown in the second map (below). Regions marked in gray exemplify heavy water use by humans. They consist of highlighting the areas in which a smaller quantity of water comes out of the rivers than it enters. The Amazon River basin is also the basin that discharges the most water into the ocean. In total, there are 6,789 thousand cubic kilometers of water per year, which is equivalent to 18% of global discharge.
On this map you can see regions depleted by intense water use, such as the Colorado River Basin (in the United States), the Amazon Basin itself (negative discharge), the Orange River Basin, in southern Africa, and also the Murray-Darling Basin in south-eastern Australia.
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All this data was calculated on the basis of information from measuring stations which monitor approximately three million river segments worldwide.
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The study also estimated that the total volume of water in the planet’s rivers from 1980 to 2009, on average, was 2,246 cubic kilometers, and a global continental flow of 37,411 km³/ year. Accurate assessment of global river flows and reserves is critical to informing water management practices. So, For scientists, this information is important, as it can guide water management actions around the worldespecially at a time of population growth and climate change.
References to the news:
JPL/NASA. “Global Accounting of Earth’s River Storage and Flow”. 2024.
Collins, E.L et al. Global patterns in river water storage dependent on residence time. Nature Geoscience2024.
