How long is the congo river in africa

That's enough water to submerge Manhattan's iconic Met Life Tower in the river—with plenty of room left over for fishing boats to pass overhead. Biologists love the lower Congo, because it's the first place they've ever found animal populations divided not by mountains or oceans, but by river currents. The river is less than a mile wide here, but entirely new species of fish are evolving on the two banks, because impenetrable currents divide their habitats.

This seemingly bottomless canyon is now known to hold more unique species than almost any other spot on Earth. There are really two Congo Rivers. That makes the Congo the second longest river of Africa after the Nile and the fifth longest in the world. The Upper Congo ends at Stanley Falls, a km stretch of rapids. Stanley Falls signals the beginning of the Middle Congo, which runs for 1, km, forming a mostly navigable river.

In some parts, this stretch can be more than 14 km wide. They paid port commissars so meagerly that bribery and extortion would trump all else. So it holds today. Those who travel the river know this, know the attendant risks. Still, the precariousness of the river traffic only hints at the wholesale abandonment of the Congo by the DRC.

To discover the most searing evidence of that abandonment, one must travel deeper into the river basin, as Pascal and I do months later, on a vessel much smaller than a floating village. One must willingly become unfixed from chronology and crisp itineraries, move gamely with the current until information gleaned from passing conversations with other river dwellers prompts a detour. Scan the shoreline for signs of life in the bush. And have faith. We find the village of Yailombo, a community of fishing families, after renting a pirogue with an outboard motor in Kisangani, heading three hours downriver to Isangi, then turning south on the Lomami River, a major tributary of the Congo that we follow for a full day.

Upon disembarking, I follow the sounds of chanting schoolchildren. The teacher is Cesar, 23, with a wispy mustache and a shy smile. I can tell by his ropy arms that he also works on the river. Then I teach from seven until noon. The bamboo schoolhouse is all the village has, because it takes more than a day by pirogue to get to the nearest government-registered school.

Cesar nods. It never happens. Like every other village we visit, Yailombo has no clinic, no paved roads, no cars, no running water, no electricity, no phone service, no Internet, no police, no newspapers.

What it has are the river and the bush. If nothing else, the remoteness protects such hamlets from the carnage inflicted by militias in the eastern DRC. We leave the Lomami River and return to the Congo. Days pass without the sight of another motorized vessel.

For whatever reason, commerce is slow, barges are scarce. At the same time, the fishermen in their pirogues are having less luck in the rain-swollen river.

We buy everything they have. Whenever we hear of markets, we go to them—bustling bazaars a mile or so into the bush—and acquire peanuts, bananas, bread, tomatoes, charcoal. From time to time the brilliant azure skies darken, an avalanche of rain pummels our pirogue, and we duck into a cove of raggedy homes on stilts, where the fishermen take us in and offer us yellow plastic jugs full of palm wine.

At dusk we seek out bare tracts along the river where we can spread our sleeping bags and cook our food. The locals gather around us and stare at our laptops for as long as we use them. We push out early each morning after first paying the fishermen for the use of their land. The distant sight of them still waving from the shoreline of those unnamed communes is what I choose to remember rather than the uniformed grifters in Bumba and Lisala.

After a long day plowing up the storm-churned Mongala River, a tributary to the Congo, we arrive late one evening at the port town of Binga. A large bald man climbs out of a pickup truck and embraces us at the docks. For the next few nights in Binga, Pascal and I are treated to surprising comfort, reposing in a handsome four-bedroom house of wood and concrete with vaulted ceilings.

How Celestin secured it for our stay is never made clear. The original occupant was a Belgian who established the rubber company in in what had hitherto been a nondescript fishing village named Mbinkya, later bastardized by the colonizers to Binga. There had been beautiful paintings on the walls. A Ping-Pong table. A Mercedes in the driveway.

Electrical power around the clock, here and throughout the town. Then in Mobutu fell; two years later the Belgians fled Binga. Today the American CEO visits infrequently. The plantations now grow mainly palm trees for oil. The number of full-time salaried workers has been reduced from 4, to The town no longer has electricity. Nostalgia for that comparatively gilded era pervades the town. The company remains here for a reason—three of them really. The tropical climate is optimal for rubber and palm trees, the labor is cheap, and the river makes possible the barging of its products miles downstream to a waiting Western market.

In turn Binga retains the ethos of a company town—albeit with threadbare benefits. For its 67, inhabitants, the 2, seasonal jobs on the plantations are the only alternative to the subsistence life of fishing, hunting, and farming. The company maintains schools and clinics. Yet a traditional Ngombe structure persists. For three years, I was told, few fish were caught, and many people starved. The fishermen were brought to their knees, and the chief removed the curse.

All of this suggested to me a show of muscle for which the warlike Ngombe were once known, before the minions of King Leopold came to exploit the river basin. The Mississippi River , for comparison, discharges about , cubic feet 17, cubic meters of water per second on average into the Gulf of Mexico, according to the National Parks Service. It's the world's second-largest river basin, at 1. For reference, the size of India is about 1. The land in the Congo Basin is a web of smaller rivers, swamps and forests.

The basin is bordered by the Sahara Desert to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the south and west, and the East African lakes region to the east. The Congo Basin surrounds the equator, with the river crossing the equator twice in about a mile-long 1, km stretch.

The mix of equatorial climate and massive water source provided by the river provides the perfect ingredients for the second-largest tropical rainforest in the world. The Congo Basin is also the natural habitat of about species of mammals, 1, species of birds and species of fish. For comparison, the Nile River has about unique species of fish, and the Mississippi River has about Some of the more well-recognized and charismatic mammals in the region include forest elephants, lowland and mountain gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, okapi, leopards , hippos , manatees and lions.

Other rainforest species include the recognizable tsetse flies, African Goliath beetles and Congo African grey parrots. Several animal species in this region are endangered, including mountain gorillas , chimpanzees and African wild dogs , mostly due to recent increases in deforestation and wildlife hunting. The rainforest provides crucial ecosystem services, such as regulating the climate, preventing drought , preserving unique species, and providing a source of food and medicine to local communities, said Alexandra Tyukavina, an assistant research professor of geographical sciences at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland.

The Congo Basin rainforest is so valuable for sequestering carbon dioxide and producing oxygen that scientists have called the rainforest the world's "second lungs," following the Amazon rainforest, according to the European Space Agency. Humans have lived in the Congo River Basin for 50, years, and the area is now home to approximately 75 million people, including distinct ethnic groups, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

Archaeological evidence suggests that some tribes began to form villages along the Congo River around 4, years ago. Remnants of iron tools and pottery suggest that some of the groups settled along the river around 5, years ago, when populations of Bantu-speaking peoples migrated from the savannahs of West Central Africa throughout the Congo Basin — an event known as the Bantu expansion.

Deforestation, primarily as part of modern agricultural practices, is the main environmental threat to the Congo River Basin and its rainforest. And then they burn those logs to fertilize the soil with the ashes and grow crops there," Tyukavina said. Industrial logging is another driver of deforestation in the region, according to Mongabay.

In addition, as the population in the region has grown at a rate of about 1. Bushmeat, or meat from wild animals like bats, monkeys, rats and snakes, which hunter-gatherer groups have traditionally relied upon as their main source of food now faces a new threat: overhunting.