A captivating image of the Peruvian Amazon in space has become a striking reminder of the devastation caused by gold mining in the region.
The stunning photo, captured by a NASA astronaut aboard the International Space Station, shows two parallel but very different rivers – one natural and one man-made – meandering through what was once a thriving rainforest. Now, however, rampant illegal logging has taken over much of the South American nation’s gold reserves and destroyed more than 250,000 acres of forest in the process, according to environmental reports.
The left side of the image shows the Inambari River, but it is the scene on the right that attracts attention with a winding path illuminated by miles of gold prospecting pits.
The rare image requires cloudless weather conditions, and the sun to cast its light at a very specific angle, called the “flash point”, to create the bright effect.
The independent miners called garimperos, are responsible for the luminescent belt in the iconic Amazon rainforest. In search of better lives, they descended on Madre de Dios in Peru, where they pursued a gold rush in the 1980s, caused by a rise in the price of the precious metal. The country is the sixth largest producer of gold in the world. In 2017, a study estimated that approximately 155 metric tons were removed from the Peruvian Amazon.
Their excessively rich search left behind a cemetery of wildlife and tropical vegetation and mercury-contaminated soil – a byproduct of the gold mining process. The mud was so rich that it could forge up to 10 to 15 grams of gold a day. Gold is priced at just over $ 1,800 an ounce, according to the Nasdaq, or about $ 64.50 a gram.
For years, the La Pampa law, a center of the hostile illegal mining industry, has been known to support “prostitution, modern slavery and organized crime” and has long been inaccessible to outsiders, according to a 2020 report in Nature. Scientists and ground authorities could only track from a satellite’s distance, as huge clusters of rainforest were cut for surface exploration.
In 2019, the Peruvian government declared martial law in the region, expelling tens of thousands of miners who relied on that work to earn a living. Since then, conservation biologists have begun working with Peru to investigate which tree species can survive the now harsh ecosystem.