Amazon River's Mouth Has One-of-a-Kind Coral Reef

01/23/2017 - 13h05

In April of last year, the announcement of the existence of a one-thousand km coral reef extending from the Amazon River mouth took the international scientific community by surprise.

Nine months later, the NGO Greenpeace is undertaking a campaign to keep the area free from imminent petroleum exploration activity.

The coral extends from the State of Maranhão to Amapá, for a total area of 9.500 km2, equal in area to six cities in the State of São Paulo.

Starting on Tuesday (the 24th), environmentalists and researchers will embark from Macapá (AP) on a 16-day expedition from the falls on their largest vessel, the Esperanza, which has the capacity for 40 people.

The primary objective of the expedition is to record the first images of the Amazon coral formations, at an average depth of one hundred meters.

This will change the paradigm for this kind of ecosystem since these coral formations are the first in the world discovered in waters with low light conditions and at the mouth of a river.

The NGO is launching a petition to the three oil companies - French Total, Brazilian Queiroz Galvão and British Petroleum (BP) - to leave their exploration blocks at the falls. Together the companies spent a total of R$346,5 million (US$110 million) for the concessions.

Although not everyone has formally endorsed the campaign, there is a general consensus that research conducted so far has been insufficient to measure the impact of oil exploration activity on the newly discovered biome.

"We have only mapped about 5%. We need to discover and explore practically everything: the architecture of the reefs, their dimensions, their specific composition in terms of organisms, how they function", says biologist Fabiano Thompson, from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

When contacted, the three oil companies informed the Folha that the planned wells are sufficiently removed in distance and depth from the coral and that additional filming will be done before drilling to confirm the absence of reefs around them.

The companies also declared that confirmation of the size and commercial viability of the reserves still depends on exploratory prospecting.

Translated by LLOYD HARDER

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