Congo River
The deepest river on Earth, draining the heart of Africa
The Congo is the deepest river in the world, plunging in places more than 220 meters, and the second longest in Africa. It drains the great rainforest basin at the continent's center, crossing the equator twice so that part of its watershed is always in its rainy season. That gives the Congo a steadiness most tropical rivers lack, and a discharge second only to the Amazon. For most of its length it is a broad, island-strewn highway through one of the least accessible regions on Earth.
Counted with its longest headwaters, the Chambeshi and Lualaba, the river system runs about 4,700 kilometers from the highlands of Zambia to the Atlantic. Through the central basin it flows wide and slow, but as it nears the coast it crashes through the Livingstone Falls, a long series of rapids and cataracts that block navigation from the sea to the interior and that, together, carry more water than any waterfall on Earth. Beyond them the river finally drops to its mouth near Banana, carving a deep canyon across the continental shelf and far out onto the ocean floor.
Those falls long sealed the interior from outsiders — Henry Morton Stanley's descent of the river in the 1870s opened it to a brutal colonial era under King Leopold's Congo Free State, remembered for forced rubber labor. The river still binds together a country with few roads, carrying people and goods on barges and pirogues. Its enormous, untapped hydroelectric potential at Inga has drawn dam proposals for decades, while its forests remain one of the planet's great carbon stores.