GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Paving a highway across South America is providing lessons on the impact of road construction elsewhere.
That’s what a University of Florida researcher and his international colleagues have determined from analyzing communities along the Amazonian portion of the nearly 4,200-mile Interoceanic Highway, a coast-to-coast road that starts at ports in Brazil and will eventually connect to ones in Peru. (more…)
*Anthropology Helps Us Understand the Past and Allows for a Deeper Understanding of the Future.*
COLUMBIA, Mo. — For more than a century and a half, scientists and tourists have visited massive animal-shaped mounds, such as Serpent Mound in Ohio, created by the indigenous people of North America. But few animal effigy mounds had been found in South America until University of Missouri anthropology professor emeritus Robert Benfer identified numerous earthen animals rising above the coastal plains of Peru, a region already renowned for the Nazca lines, the ruined city of Chan Chan, and other cultural treasures.
“The mounds will draw tourists, one day,” Benfer said. “Some of them are more than 4,000 years old. Compare that to the effigy mounds of North America, which date to between 400 and 1200 AD. The oldest Peruvian mounds were being built at the same time as the pyramids in Egypt.” (more…)
Google Sites Reigns as Most-Visited Destination in Region, Facebook Leads in Engagement Accounting for 1 in Every 4 Minutes Spent Online
comScore Presents Complimentary Webinar on the 2012 Latin America Digital Future in Focus
Santiago, Chile, March 21, 2012 – comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its annual report on Latin America’s key digital trends of the past year and what they mean for the year ahead. The 2012 Latin America Digital Future in Focusexamines how the prevailing trends in social media, online video, digital advertising, mobile and search are defining the current marketplace and how they are likely to shape the coming year. The results of the study will be presented via a complimentary, live webinar on Thursday, March 22. For more information and to register, please visit: https://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Events_Webinars/Webinar/2012/Futuro_Digital_-_Latinoamerica_2012(more…)
AUSTIN, Texas — An international team of scientists that includes two University of Texas at Austin researchers has found that Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park, which sits on top of massive reserves of oil, is in the single most biodiverse region in the Western Hemisphere.
The announcement is part of a final push for the Yasuní-ITT Initiative at the United Nations General Assembly. The initiative proposes that Ecuador receive compensation for half of the revenues the nation would lose by protecting the estimated 846 million barrels of oil that lie beneath the forest. (more…)
*Historical ecology of the Andes indicates desert-like setting on the horizon*
Catastrophic drought is on the near-term horizon for the capital city of Bolivia, according to new research into the historical ecology of the Andes.
If temperatures rise more than 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius (3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit) above those of modern times, parts of Peru and Bolivia will become a desert-like setting.
About the image: Lake Titicaca from space. Its outline may look very different in the future. Image credit: NASA(more…)
Scientists have long known that large volcanic explosions can affect the weather by spewing particles that block solar energy and cool the air.
Some suspect that extended “volcanic winters” from gigantic eruptions helped kill off dinosaurs and Neanderthals.
In the summer following Indonesia’s 1815 Tambora eruption, frost wrecked crops as far away as New England, and the 1991 blowout of the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo lowered average global temperatures by 0.7 degrees F — enough to mask the effects of greenhouse gases for a year or so. (more…)
The rocks of Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta—the highest coastal mountain on Earth—tell a fascinating tale: The mountain collides and then separates from former super-continents. Volcanoes are born and die. The mountain travels from Peru to northern Colombia and finally rotates in a clockwise direction to open up an entirely new geological basin. Smithsonian scientists were part of a four-year project to study Santa Marta’s geological evolution. Their findings are published in the October 2010 special issue of the Journal of South American Earth Sciences.
Palo Alto, CA — By integrating satellite mapping, airborne-laser technology, and ground-based plot surveys, scientists from the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, with colleagues from the World Wildlife Fund and in coordination with the Peruvian Ministry of the Environment (MINAM), have revealed the first high-resolution maps of carbon locked up in tropical forest vegetation and emitted by land-use practices.
