Everything about The Amazon Basin totally explained
The
Amazon Basin is the part of
South America drained by the
Amazon River and its tributaries. The basin is located mainly (54%) in
Brazil, but also stretches into
Peru and several other countries. The South American
rain forest of the Amazon is the largest in the world, covering about 8,235,430 km
2 with dense tropical forest. For centuries, this has protected the area and the animals residing in it.
Plant life
Not all of the plant and animal life in the Amazon Basin is known because of its huge unexplored areas. No one knows how many species of fish there are in the river. Plant growth is dense because rainfall and regrowth of leaves occur continually throughout each year.
Amazonian indigenous people
The Amazon Basin includes a diversity of traditional inhabitants as well as
biodiversity in both
flora and
fauna. These peoples have lived in the rain forest for thousands of years, and their lifestyles and cultures are well-adapted to this environment. Contrary to popular belief, their subsistence living methods don't significantly harm the environment. In the past few decades, the real threat to the Amazon Basin has been
deforestation and
cattle ranching by large
multinational corporations. People who live here also consume an extremely small amount of energy generated by plants and primary producers. Their energy-use percentage in the world is nearly zero. This is potentially helpful to the environment.
History
The Amazon basin has been continuously inhabited for more than 12,000 years, since the first proven arrivals of people in South America. Those peoples, when found by European explorers in the
16th century, were scattered in hundreds of small tribes with no writing system except for the part ruled by the
Inca Empire. Perhaps as many as 90% of the inhabitants died because of European diseases within the first hundred years of contact, many tribes perished even before direct contact with Europeans, as their germs traveled faster than explorers, contaminating village after village.
Upon the European discovery of America, the Portuguese and the Spanish signed the
Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing the country into a large Spanish western part, which encompassed all of the then unknown
North America and
Central America, and western South America, the Portuguese had Eastern South America, what would become modern eastern Brazil. The Spanish claim was confirmed by explorers, most famously by the expedition of
Francisco de Orellana in
1541-
42.
By the late
17th century Portuguese/Brazilian explorers had dominated much of the Amazon basin because the mouth of the
Amazon river lay within the Portuguese side, and the Brazilian inward exploration venturers such as the
Bandeirantes, who originated in
São Paulo, had conquered much of what is today central Brazil (states of
Mato Grosso,
Mato Grosso do Sul,
Goiás) and then proceeded to the Amazon. In
1750 the
Treaty of Madrid certified the transfer of most of the Amazon basin and the region of Mato Grosso to the Portuguese side, hugely contributing to the continental size of what is now Brazil.
Brazilian
General Rondon is also reckoned as a major
19th century explorer of the Amazon as well as a defender of its native peoples, the Brazilian state of
Rondônia is named after him.
In
1903 Brazil bought a large portion of northern
Bolivia and made it its current state of Acre. In
2006 the new socialist Bolivian president
Evo Morales talked about "getting it back. The Brazilians got it for the price of a horse". No action was taken and the two nations remain friendly. In the late 19th century, a US-Brazilian joint venture failed to implement the
Madeira-Mamoré railway, in the state of
Rondônia, with a huge cost in money and lives.
Intense deforestation began in the second half of the
20th century, with
population growth and development plans such as the failed Brazilian
Trans-Amazonian Highway. In the late
1980s the Brazilian
Chico Mendes, who lived in
Acre, became internationally famous for his passionate defense of the forest and its people, especially after he was shot to death by farmers whose interests he harmed.
Cities
Amazonia isn't heavily populated. There are a few
cities along the Amazon's banks, such as
Iquitos,
Peru and scattered settlements inland, but most of the population lives in cities, such as
Manaus in
Brazil. In many regions, the forest has been cleared for
soy bean plantations and
ranching (the most extensive non-forest use of the land) and some of the inhabitants harvest wild
rubber latex and
Brazil nuts. This is a form of extractive farms, where the trees are not cut down, and thus this is a relatively sustainable human impact.
The land
The Amazon basin is bounded by the
Guiana highlands in the north and the Brazilian highlands in the south. The Amazon, which rises in the
Andes Mountains at the west of the basin, is the second longest river in the world. It covers a distance of about 6,400 km before draining into the
Atlantic Ocean. The Amazon and its tributaries form the largest volume of water. The Amazon accounts for about 20% of the total water carried to the oceans by rivers.Some of the Amazon Rainforest is deforested because of a growing interest in hardwood products. It is also very grassy.
Languages
The most widely spoken language in the Amazon is
Portuguese, followed closely by
Spanish. On the
Brazilian side Portuguese is spoken by at least 98% of the population, whilst in the Spanish-speaking countries there can still be found a large amount of speakers of Native American languages, though Spanish easily predominates.
There are hundreds of native languages still spoken in the Amazon, most of which are spoken by only a handful of people, and thus seriously
endangered. One of the most widely spoken languages in the Amazon is
Reengage, which is actually descended from the ancient
Tupi language, originally spoken in coastal and central regions of Brazil, and brought to its present location along the
Rio Negro by Brazilian colonizers, who until the mid-17th century used Tupi more than the official Portuguese to communicate. Besides modern Reengage, other languages of the Tupi Family are spoken there, along with other language families like
Jê (with its important subbranch
Jayapura spoken in the
Xingu River region and others),
Arawak,
Karib,
Arawá,
Yanomamo,
Matsés and others.
French, Spanish, and Portuguese are all similar to and derived from
Latin.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Amazon Basin'.
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