why is south america called land of extremes longest my 10 reason
Answers
Mention South America and you conjure up images of oppressively hot, steamy jungles: the “green hell” of fiction. In fact, the Amazon basin, an enormous flat drainage area of some 2.7 million square miles (roughly 2200 by 1200 miles: 40 percent of the continent), contains the greatest continuous tropical rain forest in the world through which flows the second longest river in the world, the Amazon River. However, the South American continent is a land of geographic, climatic and biological diversity. The rainforest is only one part of the picture.
South America, as we know it today, is half the size of Africa and one-third the size of Eurasia, some 4500 miles long and 3000 miles across at its widest point. This represents an area of approximately 7 million square miles, of which two-thirds are not more than 1000 feet above sea level. These interior plains, the Amazon basin, are bounded by the Andes Mountains on the west, the Brazilian Highlands on the south and east, and the Guiana Highlands to the north.
Although the Andes are not the highest mountains in the world (the highest South American peak is Argentina’s Mt. Aconcagua at 22,834 feet, compared with Mt. Everest of the Himalayas at 29,028 feet), they do constitute the longest continuous mountain chain. Indeed, the Andes run along the entire western Pacific slope from Venezuela to the tip of the continent, Tierra del Fuego, some 5000 miles distant.
The altiplano, the high Andes of Peru, is a land of perpetual snow, with an average elevation of 12,250 to 14,000 feet. The mountains rise dramatically from the Pacific slope and drop off steeply to the east. The tradewinds carry moisture-laden clouds from the east up to, but not beyond, this massive mountain range, where they drop their watery burden on the eastern front range to fuel the mighty Amazon, with its many freshwater fish species, below.
The Andes present a wealth of life zones from alpine to tropical cloud forest and everything in between. To the west, on the Pacific slope of Peru and Chile, great deserts — 1600 miles of them — extend from the mountains down to the sea. The largest of these, the Atacama desert (600 miles long), gets virtually no rain — perhaps a shower every 10 years or so — because the Andes effectively block rain-bearing clouds from the east.
There are other rainforests in South America aside from Amazonia proper. These include the Guiana Highlands to the north and the lands ringing the Amazon drainage (southern and eastern Venezuela and the eastern slopes of Colombia, Ecuador and Peru south to Bolivia). Additionally, the Atlantic coast of Brazil down to Rio de Janeiro and a large area between Rio and Buenos Aires, as well as the Pacific coast of Colombia and Ecuador just west of the Andes, support luxuriant tropical forests.