Who is under the Amazon River? The Mystery of the River.

foreign even school children know it as the largest river in the world but it's not just a river the Amazon basin is almost the size of Australia an entire continent in high water the river flows over such distances that not a single Bridge has yet been built across it every 24 hours the Amazon brings about 19 cubic meters of water into the ocean this volume would be enough to cover the needs of New York for 12 years ahead this amazing River even has a mysterious gloomy counterpart but gigantic underground current that didn't reveal itself in any way up till now the sheer scale of this place makes it seem like a whole separate world the Amazon jungle is literally called the world's gene pool over a third of all biological species known to science lives here and new ones are regularly discovered prehistoric times terrible monsters lived here and scientists still find their remains traces of ancient cultures are also found in this place it's not clear where they came from and it's even more unclear where they went what's under the Amazon River [Music] [Music] the Amazon is 6275 kilometers long this is the longest river in the world which combines many smaller Rivers many will object saying that the longest river is the African Nile but this question is still debatable in the scientific community and is subject to multiple interpretations the main question is what is considered the source if the head of the river is maranon then the Amazon is 6400 kilometers long if we consider Apache The Source the Amazon becomes much longer specifically 6992 kilometers and leaves a 6650 kilometer long Nile far behind and if the starting point is the source of the UK Ollie the Amazon is 7 100 kilometers long and the Nile doesn't even come close to that it's funny that the Amazon is so huge that some of its parts are called differently even without taking into account the confusion about the starting point the Amazon changes its name six times along the way from west to east in its middle part the locals call it solimois and only the last relatively straight segment of the river which accounts for a third of its total length is called the Amazon many major tributaries of the Amazon get their names from the watercolor and here Nature has a lot of fun playing with colors for example the water in Rio negro appears black while in Madeira it appears golden Scarlet resembling the wine of the same name near manaus in Brazil the Rio negro merges with the yellow and murky Waters of the Solly moist rushing down the slopes of the Andes the two rivers fall into one bed and for a long time act like two immiscible liquids the entire Amazon basin is a huge lowland covered with rainforest occupying the northern part of South America the territory spans across Brazil Colombia Peru and Bolivia the Basin area is 6.5 million square kilometers this is about five percent of the entire land surface of the planet again this can be easily compared to the area of Australia which is almost 7.7 million square kilometers of course the river is very deep so much so that even ocean liners can go 3 700 kilometers Upstream from the river mouth without any problems at the lowest points its depth reaches 100 meters for comparison Lake Erie is 64 meters deep of course such a giant river system was formed over a very long time indeed the history of the Amazon can be called an epic drama Amazon originated as a transcontinental River during the miocene epoch around 11 odd million years ago its modern outline formed about 2.4 million years ago in the early pleistocene but before that over the course of many millions of years the river formed reshaped itself and changed the flow direction to the opposite at one point it even turned into an inland sea back in the Cretaceous the proto-amazon was part of the proto-amazon Congo River system it flowed west from the interior of present-day Africa hang on what did I just say Africa yes that's what I meant throughout its history the Amazon managed to move from one continent to another I know that it sounds crazy but it's nonetheless true roughly speaking at that time two huge continents were connected forming Western gondwana 80 million years ago the two continents finally split and so it happened that the Congo and proto-amazon rivers ended up on different continents and became separated not by a straight but by a whole ocean 15 million years ago the main face of the Andes uplift began this tectonic movement was caused by the Nazca plate sliding under the South American Plate the rise of the Andes and the juncture of the Bedrock Shields of Brazil and Guyana blocked the river and turned the Amazon basin into a vast Inland Sea gradually this huge body of water turned into a massive swampy freshwater lake and marine animals adapted to living in fresh water between 11 and 10 million years ago Waters broke through the Sandstone from the west and the Amazon began to flow in the opposite direction to the east the cenozoic Ice Age was long over by that time and life in the Amazon began to thrive in all its diversity we see today in addition to these dramatic Transformations on the surface a lot has happened under the River Basin over these millions of years in parallel to the river its dark antipode was forming deep underground and scientists didn't even know about it until recently in 2011 at the 12th International Congress of the Brazilian geophysical Society in Rio de Janeiro a group of scientists presented the results of extensive geologic research of the Amazon basin the report rekindled the scientific community's interest in the Basin and became a source of much debate Indian scientist Walia monatal Hamza of the national observatory in Brazil and colleagues used data collected from 241 abandoned oil wells in the area calculations have shown that there must be a large underground flow in this region it's literally huge and it's located right under the Amazon itself but at a depth of four kilometers the scientists immediately named this phenomenon in honor of its Discoverer the Hamza River the only thing is the term River can be applied here quite loosely the data of many seismic sensors and other equipment in hundreds of old Wells helped to identify the aquifers location it turned out that there is definitely a current and it even follows the same flow direction as the Amazon itself but that's as far as the similarities go the most obvious differences are the width and the flow velocity while the Amazon is from 1 to 100 kilometers wide the Hamza river is 200 to 400 kilometers wide scientists are quite certain about this and the data can only be further specified but not refuted the underground river is about 6 000 kilometers long but the flow velocity is ridiculously low while the average velocity of the Amazon is about 5 meters per second the hamsa speed is less than a millimeter per second that is Hamza doesn't really deserve to be called a river this can be compared to glacier's Velocity therefore even the discoverer while Leah Hamza himself admits that the term River can only be Loosely applied in this case however due to its immense capacity the river Hamza contributes to the Waters of the Atlantic the discharge is about 3 000 cubic meters of water per second like the gloomy Amazon's twin the Hamza follows its Channel and flows into the ocean deep below its surface when passing from west to east the Hamza and the Amazon Rivers represent an unusual geological system of Two Rivers flowing at different levels of the Earth's crust they are both major drainage systems of the Amazon basin thermal signatures of groundwater suggest that the Hamza flows West to East just like the Amazon except at a depth of about 13 000 feet or four thousand meters below the Earth's surface computer simulation suggests that a higher depth of about two thousand feet or 600 meters the river actually flows vertically but no matter how unusual the very existence of these rivers are the most interesting and even somewhat creepy tidbits about the history of this region were discovered much higher look at this fossilized bone nothing special right it's just a vertebra after all but this is a vertebra of a snake well you can say why not there exists some huge snakes like anacondas there's no doubt about that but here's an anaconda vertebra for comparison how do you like that now what kind of ancient monster is this that even the Anaconda looks like a dull worm compared to it a few million years after the well-known meteorite that killed the dinosaurs titanoboa appeared on the territory of modern Colombia this is the largest snake ever it could be up to 13 or even 15 meters long and way over a ton the longest modern snake the reticulated python is half as long no more than 7.5 meters such a monster it would seem could choose anything on the prehistoric menu even ancient turtles or crocodile ancestors but in fact as surprising as it sounds it mostly ate regular fish just as giant whales prefer microscopic Plankton and all kinds of small fish boa became extinct long ago but there are still enough creatures in the Amazon basin that it's better to avoid in the Amazon forests there are about a hundred species of poisonous frogs alone some can literally kill a person with one touch then there are crocodiles electric eels piranhas poisonous snakes vampire bats and big wild cats Brazilian wandering spiders can also be found here for a long time they were considered the most poisonous among arachnids and even got into the Guinness Book of Records in 2010. since then it has lost this title but doesn't make it any less dangerous the famous bullet ants also live in these places they got their formidable name from the most painful bites that can hurt up to one day there are also giant centipedes living here even sharks swim into the river from the ocean moreover the Anaconda mentioned earlier also inhabits these lands it's hard to imagine how some human tribes live here they still preserve their original culture and are reluctant to contact civilization but they have lived here since time immemorial archaeologists are still finding traces of ancient civilizations most recently Monumental structures abandoned almost 600 years ago were discovered which were hidden from the eyes of researchers in the dense forests of Bolivia a large-scale study about this was published in nature the history of this discovery began 20 years ago when German scientists Dr haiko prumers from the German archaeological Institute and Dr Carla James Bettencourt from the University of Bonn began archaeological excavations on two Mounds near the village of Casa robe in Amazonian Bolivia this area is known as gianos mojos it lies in the southwestern part of the Amazon River Valley yanos mojos is a plane that is flooded during the rainy season due to the rising water level and remains underwater for several months a year apparently this cyclicality has been observed here for many hundreds of years such natural conditions it would seem aren't suitable for permanent settlements however it is here that scientists have discovered many traces of an ancient pre-columbian culture its time frame is not exactly established archaeologists suggest that it was at its peak around the end of the first and beginning of the second Millennium A.D it was named after the nearest Village Casa robe this culture's traces include not only man-made Mounds but also roads and canals they often run for several kilometers in an absolutely straight line cutting right through the terrain furthermore scientists found that the settlements of the kasarabe culture occupied an area of about 16 000 square kilometers and the Mounds turned out to be the destroyed foundations of the pyramids and other buildings it became more and more interesting and no one could even imagine what else was hiding under the Amazon basin in the upper soil layers and the forest's shadow the architectural details of the Monumental structures and their surroundings were hidden by dents Amazonian vegetation to learn more about these mysterious places researchers used lidars for the first time in the Amazon Valley region these are laser rangefinders that scientists have adapted to scanning terrain from height the lidar was attached to a helicopter which then circled the area a high Precision laser device produced one and a half million pulses per second which made it possible to create a fairly accurate three-dimensional map of the territory when the scientists superimposed the previously available maps with the locations of the kosarabe culture artifacts on a new Digital model they opened up a striking view of two large areas of 147 and 315 hectares with a rather complex planning system so far we can't estimate how many people lived there however the layout of the settlements themselves suggests that a large and well-coordinated team worked here previously the settlements have already been found in other parts of the world namely in Southeast Asia and Central America in Sri Lanka but only with the discovery of the casarape culture scientists were able to State for the first time that such settlements existed in pre-hispanic times in the Amazon Valley the researchers emphasized that we are just starting the real archaeological work in this region the challenge for the future is to understand how these ancient cities functioned where the settlers came from and where they went radiocarbon analysis showed that the casa Rabe culture settlements were abandoned around 1400 A.D why for now it remains a mystery Amazon basin holds many more Mysteries like this and sometimes as you can see we don't even have the slightest idea about their existence well hopefully the more interesting it will be to find out the answers [Music]

Channel: ReYOUniverse

Views: 2,488,798

Keywords: Amazon, What's under the Amazon river?, Amazon River, The Undercurrent of the Amazon River, What do we know about the Amazon?, Ancient and Modern Monsters Under the Amazon, reyou, reyouniverse, earth

Id: ZrIoyj-fxyw

Length: 19min 7sec (1147 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 25 2022