When a river has not one, but two ominous names, it’s usually time to take notice. In the Peruvian Amazon rainforest, there is a nine kilometre waterway known as Río Hirviente (boiling river) in Spanish, and the Shanay-timpishka (boiled by the heat of the sun) in the local Asháninka language. Sections of the river are so hot, they can boil living things alive.
Geothermal scientist, Andrés Ruzo, was inspired to find and study the river, after learning about it from his grandfather. In 2011, he was guided there by his aunt, where he witnessed locals using the water to cook and clean with, and animals, such as frogs and rodents falling in.
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“The first thing to go are the eyes,” he told the audience of his 2014 TED talk. “Eyes, apparently, cook very quickly. They turn this milky-white colour.” Flesh follows soon after, and as the animal becomes overwhelmed, water enters its mouth. “They cook from the inside out.”
For Ruzo and his colleagues, the river was a conundrum. In the shadow of an enormous snake-shaped rock, the Shanay-timpishka begins as a small, cold stream, then quickly morphs into a broad, broiling torrent. In this 6.2 kilometre stretch of the river, which includes a thermal pool and a six metre waterfall, the water temperature reaches up to 94oC. Big, geothermal rivers, such as this, are usually heated by a nearby volcano, but the closest one to the Shanay-timpishka is around 700 kilometres away. So, how does the water get so hot?
According to the locals, the river is heated by Yacumama, a giant serpent spirit, who is ‘mother of the waters’ and embodied in the strange-shaped rock. She is said to give birth to both hot and cold water, and at this point in the river, the water temperature increases.
Ruzo realised that the water is heated, not be a volcano or a serpent, but by the geothermal gradient of the Earth. Put simply, the Earth’s temperature is cooler on the outside and then gets progressively hotter towards its core. When precipitation falls, in the rainforest and elsewhere, some of it sinks deep into the ground, where it becomes heated. In this part of the Amazon, it then resurfaces into the riverbed via fault-fed hot springs. So, the water here is not actually ‘boiled by the heat of the sun,’ but by the heat of the Earth.
Now, Ruzo is concerned for the region’s future. DNA sampling has revealed the presence of unique extremophile life forms in the river. Along with everything in the surrounding forest, these are now threatened by the rampant deforestation of Amazon. The Shanay-timpishka is geothermally and ecologically unique. “It’s special on a global scale,” he told his TED audience, and it deserves our protection.
