They set out to study the Congo Basin's carbon cycle and in the process have become aware of one of the world's darkest blackwater rivers: the Ruki. In the first study on this major jungle river, an international research team explains how this blackness comes about and what it says about the river system's carbon balance.
When the researchers came upon the Ruki River, they were quite taken aback. The water in this river, a tributary of the mighty Congo River, is so dark that you literally can't see your hand in front of your face."We were struck by the colour of the river," says ETH Zurich researcher Travis Drake, who has just published a study on the Ruki together with colleagues from the Sustainable Agroecosystems Group, led by Johan Six, as well as from other universities.
The reason the water is black is that it contains large amounts of dissolved organic material and hardly any sediment because of the river's low gradient. These carbon-rich substances are mostly washed into the river by the rain, which falls on dead jungle vegetation and leaches out organic compounds from the decomposing plant material. What's more, the river floods the forest in the rainy season.
So in 2019, Drake and his colleagues set up a measuring station near the city of Mbandaka, a short distance upstream from where the Ruki and the Congo converge, and measured the water discharge every two weeks and daily water level for a year to determine the annual streamflow."Our measurement methods on site were quite basic," Drake says.
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