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Amazon’s Boiling River – ANDRES RUZO

13 Nov , 2017  

The mysterious river found in amazon forest kills everything that falls into it.

MYTHS AND FACTS ABOUT THE RIVER :

  • The mysterious boiling river was discovered by a geoscientist ANDRES RUZO in 2011.
  • The myth had fascinated him since childhood.Hot rivers are associated with volcanoes,but there is no trace of volcanoes.

  • Ruzo went home over the holidays, his mother told him that the river didn’t just exist, she and his aunt had actually swim in it before.
  • In 2011, Ruzo took a chance and hiked into the Amazon rain-forest with his aunt, and saw the mysterious river with his own eye.
  • Ruzo obviously wasn’t the first to discover the river, and as suggested by its indigenous name – Shanay-timpishka, which means “boiled with the heat of the Sun” – he also wasn’t the first to wonder what made it so hot.
  • The water temperature ranges from 120 degrees up to almost 200 degrees Fahrenheit, and reaches 16 feet deep in some places. The mud of the riverbank was too hot to walk on, and if you fell in your skin would be covered in third-degree burns in less than a second.
  • Small unfortunate animals, like frogs, could be found floating dead and broiled in the water, the “eyes always seem to cook first turning milky white,” Ruzo wrote in National Geographic.

  • Ruzo, wearing only sandals, carefully hopped between the small white rocks the size of paper to take samples of different areas of the river. He found that the water averages 187 degrees Fahrenheit, which isn’t quite boiling, but is still really hot—steam emanating off the surface.
  • The size of the Boiling River requires a heat source with a lot of energy, yet the closest active volcano is more than 400 miles away.
  • After some investigating and testing different hypotheses, Ruzo and his research colleagues believe that a fault-led hydrothermal feature was causing the river to reach such temperatures. The water seeps deep into the earth, heats up underground, and resurfaces through faults and cracks.
  • Still, people do actually swim in the river, as his mother claimed, but only after heavy rainfalls when it’s diluted with cold water. More often, the water is used to make tea and for cooking.

BRIEF EXPLANATION :

Watch the below video to get the detailed explanation about the river,

Credits :

Picture Courtesy : Andres Ruzo

Video Courtesy : Great Big Story

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