AMAZONION SURPRISE: A large coral reef beneath the murky plume of water flowing from the Amazon into the Atlantic OceanJESSE ALLEN AND ROBERT SIMMON/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
In 2012, Fabiano Thompson boarded the US Navy research vessel Atlantis and set out into the Atlantic Ocean. He and his colleagues were aiming for a patch of water off the coast of Brazil about 80 to 180 kilometers from the mouth of the Amazon River. Their mission: to find a previously unexplored reef system located in the unlikeliest of places.
“If you look at textbooks, they say that reefs do not form at large river mouths such as the Amazon,” says Thompson, a microbiologist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. “We’re talking about a river that is exporting over 300,000 cubic meters of water per second into the ocean.” Large volumes of muddy freshwater—according to accepted wisdom—disrupt the preferred habitats ...
