Depending on who is looking, the mysterious jungles of the Amazon inspire many different
urges.
The wise fear and respect the incredibly diverse biosphere.
The curious enter its jungles with a sense of wonder and harbor hopes of discovery, while
the greedy view the green tangle of dense forest as something to be destroyed and converted
into a different kind of green.
Sometimes called the lungs of the world, the Amazon basin lies mostly in the South American
country of Brazil (although the rainforest spans multiple nations including Peru, Colombia
and minor amounts in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname, and the French territory
of French Guiana).
The Amazon basin itself is huge — almost 2.9 million square miles — or about 35%
of South America.
Even with the horrible exploitation of slash and burn farming practices, most of its unexplored
rainforests are very difficult to penetrate.
Under its deep and thick canopy lie many mysteries…
10.
The explorer Francisco de Orellana
After Francisco Pizarro conquered the Incan Empire, his half brother Gonzalo Pizarro (who
took part in the Incan destruction) arrived in Peru as the ruler of the city of Quito.
The local people spoke of a great Kingdom East of the Andes called the Land of Cinnamon,
or the famous golden city of El Dorado.
In 1541 Pizarro choose one of his trusted underlings, Francisco de Orellana, to accompany
him on his quest to find the Kingdoms.
From the beginning, things did not go well with the exploration crusade.
Thousands of expedition members died or simply disappeared into the wilderness.
After crossing the towering mountain peaks of the Andes only a few dozen remained.
Pizarro decided to return to Quito and ordered Orellana to try and find more kingdoms to
conquer and to also follow the rivers to the Atlantic.
With about 50 men, Orellana built some riverboats and set off down the Amazon.
Along the way he recorded encountering multiple riverside cities that they determined were
ruled by an Inland Empire.
When Orellana interrogated these people about the location of the cities of gold the locals
didn’t know what he was talking about.
Thinking they were lying, the European conquistadors resorted to torture, eventually turning most
of the peoples they came into contact with against them.
On June 24, 1542, they came across another group of riverside dwellers.
Warned of Orellana’s hostile actions by natives farther upstream, they attacked the
Orellana party.
While fighting off the brave combatants, the conquistadors were stunned to be fighting
women warriors.
This would later remind Europeans of the famous Amazon fighters of Greek legend — thus giving
the river its name.
On August 26, 1542, the men reached the Pacific, becoming the first Europeans to travel down
the Amazon.
Returning to Spain, Orellana spoke of his travels and the great urban areas he encountered
along the river.
Yet years later when the Spanish were able to finally get back to the Amazon they found
nothing but thick jungle.
What happened to all the people he saw?
9.
The Amazon jungle was once home to millions
When later expeditions tried to find the civilization that Orellana spoke about all they could find
along the Amazon river was jungle.
Orellana had died soon after his voyage and could not offer any insight or defense for
what people now claimed was, at best, an exaggeration, and at worst a lie in hopes of scamming the
Spanish crown out of money for a new expedition.
For centuries this was the conventional wisdom of the academic world: that the Amazon jungle
was sparsely populated with a smattering of now-famous uncontacted native tribes.
New research is smashing these assumptions, aided by emerging technology like satellite
imagery and LIDAR (a laser imaging system that can harmlessly see through forest canopies).
Analyzing this data has revealed that during 1200 and 1500 A.D. a huge civilization of
millions lived along the Amazon River system.
It is thought that this civilization was ruined by its success as a complex trading network,
as newly introduced European diseases spread to every corner of the Empire.
People became infected without ever seeing or coming into contact with a sick European.
With most of its people dead and its society destroyed, the jungle grew over the abandoned
urban settlements within a few years.
When European explorers returned years later all they saw was a thick, impenetrable jungle.
8.
Black soil
One of the biggest arguments against a large Amazon civilization was the basin’s famously
poor soil quality — soil so bad that it could never have supported a civilization
with such a large population.
Even today, after the jungle is mowed down and its trees burned up, farmers can only
grow a limited yield of crops before the soil becomes exhausted and they have to move on
and continue the destructive slash and burn farming cycle.
This argument was finally overturned with the discovery of terra preta.
Scientists would find patches of rich, dark soil that they termed terra preta.
Crops grown in this soil grew exponentially more than crops grown in normal Amazon soil.
At first, it was thought to be naturally occurring but then researchers were able to determine
that the soil was made by craftsmen of the ancient Amazon civilization through a process
scientists are only now beginning to understand.
7.
Boiling river
Deep in the Peruvian jungle lies a mysterious boiling river.
For decades it was thought to be a myth; it was only when Andrés Ruzo trekked deep into
the forest to try and seek it out that it was confirmed to exist.
Traveling up river after river, he finally found a river so hot that if anything falls
in it is boiled alive.
Its non-volcanic origins are a mystery.
The river starts off cool and passes through a hot spring before eventually cooling off
again.
With no known local volcanic activity, researchers are unsure of the boiling river’s origins.
Some suspect that it was actually accidentally created by unscrupulous prospectors that comb
the jungles looking for oil or mineral deposits with little care of the environmental consequences
of their Wild Wild West drilling techniques.
Similar drilling practices caused an ecological disaster in Indonesia: the Sidoarjo mudflow.
There, an oil drilling rig unleashed a mud volcano that, for about a decade, has buried
multiple villages in as much as 130 feet mud, forced 60,000 people from their homes, and
still spurts out mud to this day.
6.
Man-made structures are everywhere in the Amazon
For decades, impoverished farmers have been plundering the incredibly diverse biosphere
of the Amazon.
The scale of deforestation is mind-boggling.
As of 2019 scientists estimate that almost 20 percent of the original Amazon has been
slashed and burned.
While this ransacking of the rainforest’s unique ecosystem is unforgivable, there have
been some startling discoveries among the burnt stumps and charred endangered species.
As the forest retreats from the fires, hundreds of fortified urban areas, as well as mounds
of circles, squares, and other geometric shapes, have been revealed.
Researchers estimate that hundreds and possibly thousands of more structures are still hidden
by the existing jungles.
This has been partially confirmed by limited LIDAR scans.
These shapes hint at a complex lost civilization.
To create such structures would have required astrologers, as they are aligned to the stars,
and artisans with complex math knowledge as shown by structures that are difficult to
create, like squares in circles.
There would also have to be a society that was big enough to support these specialized
roles.
Only a fraction of the remaining jungle has been revealed by LIDAR scans.
As more of the jungle is scanned, more of the lost civilization will be revealed.
5.
Amazon nutrients come from Africa
Amazon soil is notoriously poor in nutrients, the most important of which is phosphorus.
What phosphorus the Amazon does have slowly leaks away in the massive Amazon River complex.
What is even more amazing is that the nutrients it does have do not come from local sources
— not even from the landmass of South America.
It is replenished through dust from across the ocean.
Hundreds of million tons of wind-borne, phosphorus-rich dust flows from Africa across the Atlantic
ocean and drops onto the Amazon, providing valuable nutrients.
Over half of the dust fertilizing the Amazon rainforest comes from the Bodélé depression
in Northern Chad in the Sahara desert.
Winds stir up the dust, where it rises into the upper atmosphere and is carried to South
America and the prevailing winds.
4.
Something is mysteriously making little silk towers
Deep in the Peruvian Amazon jungles, scientists like spider hunter Phil Torres were mystified
by the incredibly intricate silk structures found throughout its trees.
If they were human-sized they wouldn’t look out of place as a city plaza or art sculpture.
Dubbed “Silkhenge,” these symmetrical “buildings” harken back to the architecture
of the ancients.
The tiny silk constructions have two parts: a tall, central tower, and a circular fence
that’s about 6 millimeters across.
After months of investigation, researchers were finally able to determine their purpose
when a baby spider emerged from the tower.
This shocked the researchers, as a spider species that lays just one or two spider eggs
is incredibly rare.
Even with all their research, spider experts are still unsure of which species make the
Silkhenge complexes.
3.
Man is causing droughts in the Amazon
One of the greatest fears of climate scientists is Earth’s carbon release feedback loops.
One of the more famous examples is the Arctic permafrost.
As climate change increases, the worldwide temperatures rise.
Nowhere is this more dangerous than the Arctic.
There, rising temperatures are melting the permafrost.
This in turn is releasing methane and other greenhouse gases that the permafrost had kept
trapped under its frozen mass.
This released gas is further raising the temperature, melting more permafrost and releasing more
greenhouse gases — a feedback loop.
The Amazon jungles are a great carbon sink.
When it rains, the jungles grow, and tons after tons of carbon are locked away into
Amazon’s vegetation.
So much of the Amazon is being deforested that it is causing droughts — droughts so
rare that they were thought to be once in hundred-year events.
Now they are happening more frequently as fewer trees mean less rain.
Episodes of drought in 2005, 2010 and 2015 are alarming scientists as during droughts
carbon is actually released from the Amazon as tree growth is stunted and trees die from
thirst.
From 2005 and through 2008 the Amazon basin lost an average of 0.27 petagrams of carbon
(270 million metric tons) per year.
This causes a feedback loop.
More deforestation causes less rainfall and droughts.
As the more droughts happen, more of the forest dies, causing more droughts — a climate
change feedback loop.
2.
There’s a plastic eating fungus in the Amazon
One of the greatest innovations of the modern age has been the invention of plastics.
It has also been one of our greatest curses.
Plastic litters the landscape, causing huge problems — problems so bad that cities and
even countries have banned things like plastic bags.
In the oceans, discarded plastic has created huge garbage patches that are bigger than
Texas.
Oceans are littered with so much plastic that it is being mistaken as food by fish and animals.
Dead birds and even whales are washing up on shores with stomachs full of plastic debris.
The problem with plastic is also its best feature: it is so durable.
An answer to this problem might have been found in the Amazon.
Pestalotiopsis microspora is a fungus that may be our way out of our plastic waste crisis.
Discovered in the Amazon, scientists have tweaked the fungi into Fungi Mutarium, which
turns plastic into food.
At present, the process is too slow to be an effective way to deal with the plastic
crisis.
Hopefully, in the future, a new industry based on this fungus will be created that will be
able to deal with the mountains of plastic waste our world creates every… single…
day.
1.
Amazon forest is an overgrown garden
The lost Amazon civilization is slowly emerging from oblivion.
Stories like that told by Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana are being looked at
in a new light.
Structures emerging from the ravaged jungles are showing us physical proof of its existence.
Their advanced technology, as shown by the mysterious black soil, is now only beginning
to be understood.
However, one of the biggest vestiges left by their society has been hidden in plain
sight.
Studies of the plant species of the Amazon have revealed startling results.
While surveying the tree species of the Amazon, scientists discovered a large percentage (too
high to be by chance) are domesticated flora like the Brazil nut, the Amazon tree grape,
and the ice cream bean tree.
The results show that the lost Amazon civilization was advanced in silviculture — or the science
of identifying, domesticating, growing, and cultivating trees.
Not just any trees, but trees that provide enough food to support millions of people.
The Amazon isn’t a random collection of trees, as would be expected if it was untouched
wilderness.
No, the Amazon jungles are really just a giant collection of overgrown, man-made orchards.