{"id":36198,"date":"2026-09-04T10:15:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T14:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/?p=36198"},"modified":"2026-09-04T08:41:35","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T12:41:35","slug":"a-river-in-the-peruvian-amazon-runs-hot-enough-to-reach-86c-with-no-volcano-nearby-and-researchers-found-that-every-1c-increase-along-its-banks-was-linked-to-an-11-drop-in-local-tree-dive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/a-river-in-the-peruvian-amazon-runs-hot-enough-to-reach-86c-with-no-volcano-nearby-and-researchers-found-that-every-1c-increase-along-its-banks-was-linked-to-an-11-drop-in-local-tree-dive\/36198\/","title":{"rendered":"A river in the Peruvian Amazon runs hot enough to reach 86\u00b0C with no volcano nearby, and researchers found that every 1\u00b0C increase along its banks was linked to an 11% drop in local tree diversity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Although it can seem quite impossible to have extremely high temperatures without having volcanoes nearby, let me tell you the context deep in the Peruvian Amazon, where the Shanay-Timpishka average temperature is about 86\u00b0C (187\u00b0F)<\/a>. This is such a high temperature that it can kill small animals by causing severe burns in a matter of seconds. The average temperature still can still rise up to 98\u00b0C (208\u00b0F) as said before with not any single volcano nearby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This turns out to be more thana geological curiosity for researchers. They investigated 70 plots near the riverbanks and they discovered that for every 1\u00b0C increase in mean annual air temperature, 11 percent of local tree diversity declined. These temperatures definitely make us think that a hotter Amazon<\/a> could begin to reorganize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How can a river get this hot without a volcano?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

All this thing with the river is not something new. Local communities have labeled the river as Shanay-Timpishka and this means \u201cboiled with the heat of the sun.\u201d So it is that this place started to have different ideas or theories of what could be happening here. Geoscientist Andr\u00e9s Ruzo<\/a> started to measure the waters after he listened to stories of the place when he was a child. One story was that the temperatures were comparable to the ones used for brewing very hot coffee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Read More: Four GPS collars tracked snow leopards across the Himalayas for 1,239 days and revealed home ranges up to 97 times larger than earlier estimates, with three cats repeatedly crossing between Nepal, India, and China as if the borders did not exist<\/a><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

And supposedly, the leading explanation is a fault-fed geothermal system<\/a>. It seems rainwater tends to filter through fractures in the earth, until it goes deep underground, absorbing heat from the surrounding rocks and rising back up again like hot springs that warm the river. What is still missing is the study related to the exact route, depth and the time that the water takes in doing all that journey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Researcher
A researcher works beside the steaming Boiling River in Peru, where scientists have used the natural temperature gradient to investigate how Amazonian vegetation responds to unusually hot conditions.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Tree diversity drops as the forest gets hotter<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As was said before, an estimated 11 percent decline in local tree diversity<\/a> was associated with each increasing 1\u00baC every year. And at the same time, the hottest plots ended up dominated by species that normally are found in the warmer parts of the Amazon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also, these tree communities resistant to heat started to become very similar to one another. And this suggests that the constant heat drastically reduced the opportunity for other species to survive. This can be quite dangerous, not because the biodiversity will disappear from one day to the next, but because it can become \u201csimpler\u201d if only heat-tolerant trees keep on gaining space and the sensitive ones disappear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some trees adjust, but not enough to erase the risk<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Another more specific work related to the trees tested if six common Amazonian woody species<\/a> could adapt to hotter conditions. Although three of them could increase their photosynthetic thermal tolerance between the different seasons, the response differed a lot depending on the species.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Read More: Europe\u2019s great rivers are shrinking under heat and drought, and the Danube, Rhine and Loire are showing how fast summer can redraw the continent<\/a><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Another study found that the thermal safety margins<\/a> generally shrink at hotter sites. In this case, the researchers explained that this was because some trees are working closer to temperatures that damage their photosynthetic machinery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What this river can and cannot tell us<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Shanay-Timpishka is definitely not a perfect model of the entire Amazon<\/a> and strangely, this small riverside forest is facing conditions that are really different from an enormous basin undergoing rapid climate change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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