The Amazon River has a life expectancy of at least 9 million years

The new age of the legendary Amazon River has just been officially announced, showing that the river is not as young as we thought it was.

Accordingly, researchers from the University of Amsterdam and the University of Brasilia have announced that the Amazon River has a life expectancy of at least 9 million to 9.4 million years old. This rejects the notion that the river is only 1 to 1.5 million years younger. The science team said.

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To reach this conclusion, the research team analyzed drilling sediments off the Amazon River. The results show that there is a significant change in sedimentary structure related to the Miocene period from about 9 million to 9.4 million years old. It is known that this is a period when the river's upper stream was strongly changed because of the low land to the top of the Andes.

Previously, scientists had previously suggested that Amazon was very young, about 1 to 1.5 million years old.

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' We have narrowed the beginning of the Amazon River, conducted a search and analysis of ancient specimens such as from ancient underground propellers located in the Amazon River and swirling areas believed to be storage and recording sites. exactly the period of activity and evolution of the river . "Former researcher Brasilia Farid Chemale, now a professor at the University of Unisinos, said in a statement.

' Currently, we have adopted higher resolution analysis techniques, more accurately than what previous studies have not done in this river area .'

Samples collected from boreholes show an increase and strong development of compounds similar to grass, which suggests that the river climate may change at least 2.5 million years ago but vegetation in Amazon is the most obvious expression.

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Carina Hoorn, a researcher at UvA's Institute of Biodiversity and Ecology, said: " The changes discovered in the river's sedimentary lakes have led to the question of whether this Amazon region has changed dramatically. In the process of cooling the Plio-Pleistocene planet, our new data confirms the age of this Amazon river, it is very old, not as young as we thought before and this study also indicates the expansion of grasslands during the Pleistocene that studies have never mentioned before . "

This research has just been published in Global and Planetary Change.