Lauricocha (lake)
| Laguna Lauricocha | ||
|---|---|---|
| Geographical location | Lauricocha Province , Huánuco Region ( Peru ) | |
| Drain | Río Lauricocha | |
| Data | ||
| Coordinates | 10 ° 19 ′ 0 ″ S , 76 ° 42 ′ 0 ″ W | |
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| Altitude above sea level | 3845 m | |
| length | 7 km | |
| width | 1.4 km | |
Lake Laguna Lauricocha ( Quechua Lawriqucha ) is located in the Andes mountain ranges in central Peru .
location
Lake Laguna Lauricocha is located in the Lauricocha Province , Huánuco Region , and is the northernmost of the lakes fed by the Andean glaciers . It is located 20 km east of the Andean summit Yerupaja and 190 km north-northeast of the Peruvian capital Lima . The lake is located at an altitude of 3845 m above sea level in one of the most sparsely populated strips of land in Peru.
size
The lake has a length of 7000 m in the east-west direction and is 1400 m wide at its widest point in the north-south direction.
River system
The Laguna Lauricocha is fed by a few small rivers from the Cordillera Raura , a mountain range of the Peruvian Andes , only 10 km away . The Río Lauricocha flows out of the lake of the same name and later joins the Río Nupe to form the Río Marañón , the main hydrological tributary of the Amazon .
Amazon source
For a long time the Laguna Lauricocha was considered the origin of the Amazon. In 1909, the German South American explorer Wilhelm Sievers finally determined three lagoons above the lake as sources of the Marañón River and thus also of the Amazon. However, just a few decades later, beginning in the mid-1930s, the actual source of the Amazon was largely no longer located at the origin of the Marañón, but at the sources of the second, longer Amazon source river Ucayali . Since around 1971 the furthest Amazon source in the area of the glacier massif Nevado Mismi in southern Peru in the headwaters of the Río Apurímac , which was identified by the American Loren McIntyre as the main Ucayali headwaters, has been assumed . The location of this headwaters was confirmed by several other expeditions and investigations in the 1990s and 2000s. First, an in Carhuasanta Gorge on the northern slope of the applied Nevado Mismi springing glacial stream than the Amazon source and was until the late 1990s generally accepted. The discoverer of the Amazon spring, confirmed in 2007 and officially marked since 2011, in the neighboring Apacheta Gorge on Nevado Quehuisha (Kiwicha Mountain), a neighboring mountain of the Mismi, is the Polish geographer Jacek Palkiewicz, who was the first to suggest this spring in 1996.