Aerial view of the Amazon River
More than 6400 km of river, no bridges. The main reasons are simple: almost no one needs them, and they are very difficult to build. But there are those who say that it’s a good thing that’s the case.
The Amazon meanders along at least 6,400 kilometersbeing (perhaps) the , but it is not crossed by a single bridge (at least officially).
Given humanity’s strong tendency to reshape natural landscapes and traverse the seemingly impossible, this anomaly raises the question – why?
One of the main reasons is that there is not much demand of a crossing of the Amazon River, explains .
The depths of the tropical forests are sparsely populatedwith relatively little infrastructure and roads, which makes bridges unnecessary — contrary to what happens, as we know in cities like London or Porto. The undefeated team already has 6, and it seems like there are never too many.
“There is not a sufficiently pressing need for a bridge over the Amazon”, explained in 2022 the professor of Structural Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich Walter Kaufmannto the .
“Of course, there are also technical and logistical difficulties“, added Kaufmann. It is undeniably a challenge to build infrastructure in the dense tropical forest – which is why, in fact, there are very few human settlements of significant size in the Amazon.
The ground is soft and unpredictableas well as being extremely easy for any man-made structure to be consumed by relentless vegetation of the tropical forest and adverse conditions, such as intense rain.
Any attempt to build a bridge, unless perfectly planned, would probably end up on collapsed foundations and covered in relentless vegetation.
It’s almost unnoticeable when looking at the landscape, but the Amazon is full of traces of human settlements that have been lost in nature over the centuries.
New imaging technologies are revealing that there are likely to be more than 10,000 pre-Columbian archaeological sites hidden in the Amazon basin.
But unlike the archaeological remains of ancient cultures in temperate regions of the world, the structures of the Amazon were flooded, swallowed by plant growth and burial.
Even contemporary infrastructures are sometimes abandoned. This is the case of the famous BR-319, an 870-kilometer road long that crosses an untouched part of the Amazon rainforest, from Manaus to Porto Velho.
The road was built in the early 1970s, during the Brazilian military dictatorship, but ended up being abandoned in 1988 because its maintenance was not economical and required constant repairs due to its rapid deterioration.
Nonetheless, Some say it’s better even if the bridges never begin to cross the Amazon River. The Amazon is an incredibly rich and unique hive of biodiversity and human culture, which has already been under immense pressure from the logging and mining.
The construction of roads, highways and bridges could open the Amazon to greater exploitation. According to some studies, the overwhelming majority (95%) of deforestation occurs within a 5.5 kilometer radius of a roadbecause it gives access to loggers, vehicles and heavy machinery.
One, published in 2022 in Remote Sensingused AI to identify rural roads (often unofficial and illegal) in the Brazilian Amazon from satellite images — and identified 3.46 million km of roads.
The researchers used these findings to see how the new roads were having impact.impact on deforestationforest fires and landscape fragmentation.
“These are arteries of destruction. The roads are opened to extract wood, and the branches spread out from the main line, where the trucks and heavy machinery are,” he told the Carlos Souza Jr., researcher who runs an Amazon monitoring program and co-author of the study.
Apparently, the Amazon has no bridges — and thank goodness.
