Major Rivers in the Amazon Drop to Record-Low Water Levels

Amid a record-breaking drought, major river basins in the Amazon Rainforest are reaching their lowest levels ever recorded, with some even running dry.

According to data from the Brazilian Geological Service (SGB), the Madeira River reached 48 centimeters at Porto Velho on September 17. By comparison, the average water level of the river at this point has been 3.32 meters. As Mongabay reported, the Madeira River, which stretches 1,450 kilometers (900 miles), makes up about 15% of water in the Amazon Basin and is the largest tributary of the Amazon River.

The Solimões, another major tributary to the Amazon River, reached its lowest recorded level in Tabatinga, Brazil this week, and part of the Solimões River in Tefé had completely dried up by September 17, Reuters reported.

On Monday, the Purus River reached a water level more than 2 meters below its previous historic low recorded in 1983, Mongabay reported.

“We are going through a critical year,” Greenpeace spokesperson Romulo Batista told Reuters. 

“Last year was already the hottest year in the last 125,000 years. This year several months have broken last year’s records.”

The record-breaking water levels across the Amazon Basin comes as Brazil faces its worst drought in 70 years, since records began. As The Associated Press reported, 59% of the country is under stress from the drought.

“This is the first time that a drought has covered all the way from the North to the country’s Southeast,” Ana Paula Cunha, drought researcher at Brazil’s National Center for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters (CEMADEN), said in a statement last week. “It is the most intense and widespread drought in history.”

But conditions could worsen still, as the dry season for the region usually lasts through November, BBC reported.

“More records will be broken,” Cunha told Mongabay. “The next round of rain is expected to be delayed, so you can expect more rain only in November, or even later.”

Several factors have played a role in the extensive drought, including climate change, the El Niño event that started in 2023 and decades of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.

“We’ve seen floods not only in Brazil, but around the world, droughts and a lot of fires here in the Amazon, in the Serrado, in the Pantanal and around the world,” Batista said. “Climate change is no longer something to worry about in the future, ten or twenty years from now, it’s here and it’s here with much more force than we expected.”