After a four-hour journey through the Peruvian rainforest, La Bomba appears: a river that boils at 45 degrees. Also known as Shanay-timpishka or Boiling River, it is part of a tributary in the central-eastern region of the country that connects to the mighty Amazon River.
It releases huge columns of steam and is legendary. How it increases its temperature and what implications it has on the environment.
What is La Bomba, the river that boils at 45 degrees
Huge columns of steam rise from a group of trees in the wide plate-shaped depression below.
Researchers have determined that it heats up due to geothermal sources deep underground.
The boiling river in Peru. (Photo: BBC).
“You only see it in front of you after passing a landscape peak,” explains Alyssa Kullberg, postdoctoral researcher in plant ecology at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (Switzerland), to BBC.
Kullberg visited this place for the first time in 2022 along with a team from the United States and Peru, including Riley Fortier, who described the changes in the landscape. “For all of us, it was evident that there was a clear and noticeable change along the river,” he said.
“The forest seemed more shrubby. There weren’t as many big trees, and it also seemed a bit drier, the leaf litter was crunchier,” he added.
Furthermore, as described by the scientists, the heat is felt much more intensely. He and other team members realized that this place represented a possible snapshot of how climate change could alter the Amazon, as global warming raises the average air temperature above the current levels.
In that sense, they thought that the Boiling River could be considered a kind of natural experiment, a possible glimpse of the future.
At what temperature does the river reach
In an article published in October, Fortier, Kullberg, and their colleagues from the United States and Peru reported how they recorded the temperature for a year near the Boiling River.
They used 13 temperature measuring devices along a stretch of the river that included cooler areas, typical of the forest. The annual average temperature ranged between 24-25 °C in the coldest places and 28-29 °C in the warmer areas.
The maximum air temperatures recorded in some of the warmer places along the boiling river approached 45 °C.
A previous analysis (which has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal) by geothermal scientist Andrés Ruzo concluded that the average temperature of the water is 86 °C.
Signs of climate change
La Bomba River is an example of how the Amazon could change in the future, stated Diego Oliveira Brandão, a member of the technical-scientific secretariat of the Scientific Panel for the Amazon, a scientific research organization.
A sample of climate change?
He emphasized his concern about the impact that these consequences of climate change could have on indigenous peoples. “These populations rely on biological resources,” he says.
Another key point is that, as temperatures rise, even if there is water availability, the photosynthetic capacity of plants could decrease.
Kullberg added that, although the river shows how increasing temperatures could affect biodiversity and plant growth, it is important to remember that this part of the Amazon may not exactly reflect the future of the rainforest in a broader sense.
