Peruvian-Mexican documentary photographer Musuk Nolte describes one image from an award-winning series as his favorite: an aerial shot of three fishermen standing in what was once a river. You can see why when you look at it. The men are very small. They are surrounded by an endless expanse of dry earth. A caption is not necessary for the picture.
It presents the case completely on its own. Despite the fact that the Amazon River recently ran dry in three sections for the first time since records began in 1902, the world continues to treat this as weather news instead of the civilizational warning that it is.
| Category | Details |
|---|---|
| River Name | Amazon River |
| Total Length | 6,400 km (3,977 miles) |
| Origin | Peruvian Andes |
| Primary Flow | Brazil (also Colombia) |
| Record Low Recorded | October 2023, Manaus port gauge |
| Previous Record | 2010 |
| Records Dating Back To | 1902 |
| People Affected | 47+ million across the Amazon Basin |
| Children Affected | 420,000 (Peru, Brazil, Colombia) |
| Key Cities Affected | Manaus, Tefé, Manacapuru |
| Primary Cause | El Niño + accelerating climate change |
| Countries in Amazon Basin | Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela |
| Reference Website | INPA – National Institute of Amazon Research |
In late 2023, Nolte spent almost a month in the vicinity of Manaus, Brazil, recording what river scientists and hydrologists were already referring to as a drought of historic proportions. After the crisis upstream, he had first traveled to Iquitos, Peru. However, he soon discovered that discussing the Amazon while honoring its political boundaries is practically ridiculous—the river doesn’t give a damn where Peru ends and Brazil begins.
He followed the water—or rather, the lack of it—east and south to Manaus, a two-million-person city situated at the meeting point of the Amazon and Negro rivers. He discovered that the water level at the Manaus port gauge was at its lowest point since monitoring started in 1902. 121 years’ worth of records. Absent. in just one dry season.
The figures are astounding, but unless you connect them to a human being, they quickly lose their authenticity. So think about this: Pedro Mendonça, a villager in Santa Helena do Inglæ, west of Manaus, had not seen rain for three months. It was hotter than any drought he could recall, he claimed.
According to him, his community was essentially isolated. Previously delivered by boat, goods were now delivered by tractor or on foot. In Manacapuru, a young man used to sail the two kilometers he had to walk along a fractured riverbed to deliver food to his mother. From above, that path appeared to be a scarred area, as Nolte put it.
One of the main tributaries of the Amazon, the Solimké River, sank to a depth of only three meters. Once-free-moving boats sat stranded on exposed sand in its channels. Smaller tributaries became completely impassable. This was not a drought in the meteorological sense for communities that rely on the river as their only means of transportation for things like groceries, school runs, and getting to a hospital.
It was more akin to a siege. Another Santa Helena do Inglún resident, Luciana Valentin, reported that tainted water caused her children to become ill with fever, vomiting, and diarrhea. There wasn’t a clean substitute. There was absolutely no other choice.
In October 2023, while sweating in the early morning heat, forest scientist Jochen Schöngart of the National Institute of Amazon Research was picking his way along an exposed escarpment just above the river when he discovered ceramic shards lodged between boulders—relics from an earlier civilization. Life-size faces carved into the bedrock nearby were probably created during a megadrought some 1,000 years ago. In living memory, they had not been seen.
They were now. This tiny, almost incidental detail conveys a message that the temperature charts are unable to fully convey: the river is returning to conditions not seen in a millennium due to the drought.
The drought coincided with weeks of heat waves, adding to the already dire situation. The highest recorded temperature in and around Manaus was 39 degrees Celsius, which is six degrees above average. The city was choked by smoke from farmers’ jungle fires. Then, in what Schöngart subsequently called the most bizarre episode of the season, a sandstorm passed through and completely obscured the sun.
Hydrologist Ayan Fleischmann removed a temperature sensor from the water 600 kilometers upstream over Lake Tefé and discovered that it had recorded 39.1 degrees Celsius. The lake’s shallower areas might have reached 41 degrees. The surface of the lake had fallen 6.5 meters below its typical yearly low. Over 100 river dolphins that were in danger of extinction perished. Fish passed away. In some areas of the basin, the ecosystem essentially collapsed.
El Niño, which had been causing unpredictable weather patterns worldwide through 2023, was blamed by Brazil’s science ministry for the drought’s severity. That is true, but it is also lacking. For years, Schöngart and his associates have been monitoring a long-term pattern in which the Amazon’s wet seasons are becoming wetter and its dry seasons are becoming drier, which is more concerning than a single climate event. Both ends of the extremes are getting wider.
Manaus has also seen severe flooding during rainy seasons in recent years; in fact, city officials have constructed temporary wooden walkways over flooded historic streets. No community, no matter how accustomed to seasonal change, has the means to deal with the unpredictability of the river that once supported this civilization.
420,000 children in Peru, Brazil, and Colombia were left without consistent access to food, water, or education due to the drought, according to a November 2024 UNICEF report. The effects of record-low water levels simultaneously affected food supply chains, transportation networks, and medical access throughout the larger Amazon basin, which supports more than 47 million people across six countries.
This was not a local annoyance. It was a systemic failure in one of the planet’s most hydrologically and biologically significant regions.
It’s difficult to ignore how slowly the scope of this becomes apparent in the global discourse. By any reasonable measure, a drought that destroys endangered species, breaks records dating back to 1902, affects almost 50 million people, and reveals ancient carvings that have been hidden for a millennium should garner sustained international attention. It receives a news cycle.
The World Press Photo award was given to Nolte’s images, which was a significant and well-deserved honor. However, the rain returned. The river began to rise. People moved on. “Now, in fact, it’s in flood stage,” Nolte said, almost casually. And for some reason, that made forgetting it easier.
Schöngart and other scholars are quietly but increasingly urgently stating that this is not a tale of a single bad year. He refers to the changes occurring in the Amazon basin’s hydrological cycle as “massive.” Although the underlying trend was already in place, El Niño accelerated the 2023 drought.
It is currently genuinely unclear whether the forest, its ecosystems, and the tens of millions of people who rely on it can adapt to a cycle that alternates between historic droughts and floods. It is worthwhile to sit with that uncertainty. The Amazon is more than a river. It’s a system of climate. It also conveys a message to us.
