Why The Amazon Matters
Around fifteen million years ago, the South American and Nazca tectonic plates converged into each other due to the weight of the ocean on the Nazca plate. The collision of the two plates caused the creation of the Andes Mountain Range, sitting on the edge of the Chilean border with the Pacific Ocean. The rising of the land there and the linkage of the Brazilian and Guyanese land caused the Amazon River (which had been flowing towards the west at the time) to become a broad, inland sea. With time, this large body of water became a vast freshwater lake. This meant that the marine life had to...