Brazilian scientists claim to have discovered traces of a huge underground river running deep beneath the Amazon
According to the Department of Geophysics of the National Observatory (Observatorio Nacional, ON), Brazilian scientists have discovered an underground river that accompanies the flow of the Amazon River at a depth of 4,000 meters. They found that the Amazon basin has two drainage systems: the Amazon River itself, and an underground river running parallel to it, fed by groundwater. The underground river is named Hamza, after the Indian scientist Valiya Mannathal Hamza, who has been studying the Amazon for over 45 years.
The discovery was made possible by a temperature study conducted by scientists through 241 wells drilled by the Brazilian state oil company Petrobras in the Amazon between 1970 and 1980 in search of hydrocarbons.
Both rivers - the Amazon and the Hamza - flow in the same direction, but they have a number of significant differences. The width of the two rivers is not the same: the shores of the Amazon, depending on the location, are separated from 1 to 100 kilometers. The width of the Khamza River is much greater - from 200 to 400 kilometers. Undoubtedly, the underground river Khamza has a smaller flow - 3 thousand cubic meters per second against 133 thousand cubic meters at the Amazon. Moreover, if the water speed in the Amazon River fluctuates from 0.1 to 2 meters per second, then for Hamza the flow is from 10 to 100 meters per year.