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TOPIC: Amazon Sea
Blobrana


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Mount Mismi
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Latitude: -15.511611° Longitude: -71.705929°

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Blobrana


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Amazon River
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Scientists in Brazil are claiming to have established as a scientific fact that the Amazon is the longest river in the world.
The Amazon is recognised as the world's largest river by volume, but has generally been regarded as second in length to the River Nile in Egypt.
The claim follows an expedition to Peru that is said to have established a new starting point further south.
It puts the Amazon at 6,800km  compared to the Nile's 6,695km.

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RE: Amazon Sea
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Sediments of eastern origin were washed down from a highland area that formed in the Cretaceous Period, when the South American and African tectonic plates broke away from each other.
That might have tilted the river's flow westward, sending sediment as old as two billion years toward the centre of the continent.

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Afterwards, a relatively low ridge, called the Purus Arch, rose in the middle of the continent, running north and south. This divided the Amazon's flow, so that one half flowed eastward toward the Atlantic and the other westward toward the Andes.

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The world's largest river basin, the Amazon, once flowed from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific - opposite its present direction - according to research by a geology graduate student and his advisor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Russell Mapes, a graduate student from Grass Valley, California, set out in 2004 to study the speed at which sediment in the Amazon travels from the Andes mountains, in the present headwaters of the river, to the Atlantic. While studying sedimentary rocks in the river basin he discovered something else - ancient mineral grains in the central part of South America that could only have originated in now-eroded mountains in the eastern part of the continent.

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Peruvian explorers have discovered the fossilized remains of a giant, 14 meter long crocodile deep in the Amazon jungle, lending credence to a theory that the world's largest rain forest was once a huge inland sea.

A French-funded expedition of 12 scientists found the remains of the crocodile's huge skeleton, jaw and teeth under the thick undergrowth of Peru's northern jungle which is part of the Amazon basin.
Once weighing 9 tons and with a 1.3 meter long head, the crocodile is only the second fossil discovery of its kind in three decades.

"This rare find should help us prove that today's Amazon jungle was once an inland sea, possibly connected to the Caribbean" - Rodolfo Salas, head of paleontology at the National History Museum of Peru, whose expedition received funding from the University of Toulouse and French clothing company Devanlay.

Other reptiles and giant armadillos were also found nearby.
Scientists believe the collision of the South American and the Nazca plates 15 million years ago formed the Andes mountains, blocking the Amazon river which flowed westward and causing the area to become a vast inland sea.
Following cleaning and research, the fossil is expected to be shown in Peru's Natural History Museum.

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