Africa in Perspective

The Nile is Longest but not Strongest

I was chatting with the Brilliant Wife about our upcoming Nile Cruise.

“Where does the Nile start? Victoria … Falls? Victoria Lake?”

We’ve been to Victoria Falls. An amazing place. But that’s the Zambezi River…

Lake Victoria!

The Nile is the longest river in the world, though some argue the Amazon may be a bit longer. I wondered how the Nile compared to the Mississippi?

Welcome to African Geography 101!

Did you like geography in school? I loved it. I can spend hours looking at maps. Visual learning is the best.

Let’s step back and look at the continents first. Africa is the second largest continent, after Asia.

Credit: Statista

Looking at the top middle map and the first map, can you visualize the length of the Nile v. the Mississippi?

The Nile is 6650 kilometers (4,132 miles) long. That’s more than 800 miles longer than the distance from Miami to Seattle!

Credit: JKGeography.com. The Nile’s drainage basin is 3,349,000 sq. km.

The Mississippi is 3766 kilometers long and drains 2,980,000 square km.

Credit: JKGeography.com.

But there are some things a map can’t tell you. Even though the Nile is a lot longer than the Mississippi, and has a larger drainage basin, the Mississippi discharges, on the average, 16,800 cubic meters per second of water, compared to only 2,633 cu.m./sec for the Nile. In other words the Mississippi sends more than 6 times the volume of water into the Gulf of Mexico as the Nile discharges into the Mediterranean Sea.

How about people? The African continent has more than 1.5 billion people.

Credit: World Population Review

Egypt has 112.7 million people, compared to 128.5 million people in Mexico and 334.9 million in the United States.

Both the Nile and the Mississippi have famous cities at or near their mouth: Cairo and New Orleans, though Cairo has 22,500,00 people while greater New Orleans has just 1.3 million. And technically Alexandria Egypt (pop. 6.1 million) is closer to the mouth of the Nile than Cairo.

Now check out this population growth curve for Cairo!

Both New Orleans and Cairo are at the same latitude, about 30 degrees north of the equator, but while the Mississippi runs south to the Gulf of Mexico, the Nile flows north to the Mediterranean.

Let’s look at the African Economy:

Credit VisualCapitalistVoronoi

Egypt will overtake South Africa as the biggest economy in Africa in the next few years!

Egypt’s economy at $390 billion is slightly larger than that of Indiana, with a growth rate of 2.9%. By comparison, Mexico’s economy, at $1.8 trillion, is about the same as the combined economies of Ohio, Michigan and Indiana. California? $3.9 trillion, ten times that of Egypt. If California was a country, it would be the 5th largest economy in the world, ahead of India and just behind Japan (#3) and Germany (#4). China is second and India 6th.

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We’ve got a real cold snap here, and a bit of snow. Temperature right now outside my window is a chilly 14F, or -10C.

My first walk yesterday, after arriving home from Boston, was to check out the spot where the minnows died from lack of oxygen, covered in last week’s story, Fish Kill on Timber Trace Creek.

The dead minnows were all gone. Not a trace.

A team of mallards were working their way downstream, waddling, swimming, and dabbling along. Yes, mallards do eat small dead fish! I am glad they didn’t go to waste. Nature has a way of making use of almost everything.

It is brightening a bit in the east now as we approach the shortest day of the year. Hope your day is a bright one! Thanks for traveling along~!\