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Ed's Frog MessageBlog Archive17th June 2010 - Ricky Gervais and the Bible... 20th May 2010 - Caught with our pants down 15th April 2010 - How dangerous are jaguars really? 18th March 2010 - A Hungry Anaconda? 4th March 2010 - Ed's Rotten Arm 18th February 2010 - Paddling across the 'Meeting of the Waters' 4th February 2010 - Damming the Amazon 21st January 2010 - Dedication 7th January 2010 - Swamp Donkey 17th December 2009 - A Little Bit Scared 3rd December 2009 - Scratched and Confused 19th November 2009 - Oil Under the Jungle 29th October 2009 - Watch out for the CAIMAN! 15th October 2009 - On our own in the jungle 1st October 2009 - Trench Warfare 17th September 2009 - The Island of Food 3rd September 2009 - Food Dreams 27th August 2009 - Heavy packs and the search for fish
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18th February 2010 - Paddling across the 'Meeting of the Waters' manpoweredOn Tuesday Cho and I paddled 10 kilometres across the “Meeting of the Waters” in Brazil. We wanted to change sides of the river so we could walk on the north bank for the next few months. Watch the video below... Why are the two rivers different colours? The Rio Negro is a black water river and is stained black by the tannins in the vegetation that grows along its banks. The Rio Solimoes is a white water river (actually it looks brown) and the water would be clear except that it carries huge amounts of sediment (mostly mud) and so this makes it look dirty and brown.
Why don’t the rivers mix? The Rio Negro flows from the Guyanan Shield mountains and is a slow moving river on a gentle slope. Because of its speed and colour, it is warmer than the Solimoes by about 4 degrees. The Solimoes flows from the Andes. Because the Andes are a much younger mountain range there is a steeper slope, faster water, and more erosion (water moving the soil downstream). The differences encourage the waters to maintain their channels and they don't mix for many kilometres!
From this point onwards Cho and I are walking down the huge river that is made up of both the above rivers. It is now officially called the Amazon. Join us on 4th March for the next installment and don't forget to check out our new Question of the Week video - and send in your questions to us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ! For more about Ed and his Amazon adventure, visit www.walkingtheamazon.com. |
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Ed
Stafford is an explorer. Like Captain Scott of the Antarctic and Sir
Ranulph Fiennes before him, he has a passion for discovering and
learning about the vast planet that we all live on. Today, so many of
the great expeditions have already been done by explorers of the past.
There are no longer many things that people can do and say, "I was the
first person in the world to do that!" 
