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Marajó: Where the Amazon Meets the Sea
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17041 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1990 |
3,808 Words |
| Author
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Jerry Emory
Writer Jerry Emory lived in Brazil in 1983, conducting
research for his master's degree in geography. In 1989, he
traveled through the Brazilian Amazon, spending time on
Marajo. He is presently at work on a project on the Galapagos
Islands and a book for children on the natural history of the
night. |
Tucked in a half-degree below the equator in the Brazilian state of Para, Marajó Island forms the last obstacle between the mighty Amazon River and the blue of the Atlantic Ocean. After crashing down from the Andes and meandering almost four thousand miles, the muddy Amazon waters splay out to the north of Marajó, while a network of southerly furros tap into the Para River to join up with the Tocantins and loop around into Marajó Bay.
Its shores scraped by impressive twenty-foot dies and continuously reshaped by this trio of waterways, Marajó's mountainless landscape is dominated by the presence of water. Of all the fresh water entering the world's oceans, fully 20 percent passes by this Switzerland-sized island as it eases out of the Amazon Basin.
Part land and part water, Marajó muddles the clean break one feels while standing firm on a typical riverbank or coastline; it redefines that dynamic edge where land and water meet. Miniature islands of vegetation float past its shores daily, rivers can dig new channels over night, and large swaths of terra firma cleave into the unquestioning Amazon and Para Rivers without warning.
Marajó's surface is partitioned and gouged by the dendritic etchings of countless rivers, both active and long since abandoned. Its shoreline is a maze of inlets, bays, and marshes. Water is everywhere. The island receives well over a hundred inches of rain annually - not a record by Amazon standards, but impressive. Between January and April (the heart of the rain season) almost two thirds of the island disappears under a thin layer of Amazonian essence: warm, clear water.
Unlike classic volcanic islands, or islands stacked upon generations of coral, or continental archipelagos isolated offshore by rising sea levels, Marajó was built up incrementally. For millennia, it is believed, the Amazon's sediment-rich waters deposited Marajó against a stable outcropping of rock or ancient sediments on the island's eastern edge. A geologic smorgasbord, Marajó was served up in the middle of the Amazon's two hundred mile-wide delta with little pieces of distant Andes, fragments of the Guiana highlands, and soil from the Brazilian shield contributing to the end product.
Rivers of life, rivers of people
After the countless rivers and canals helped from Marajó, they delivered people. The date for the first human occupation of
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