Word: amazon
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...study of undersea rocks. Last week Dr. Norman D. Newell, of New York City's American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University, was studying fossil seashells he had just brought back from the Peruvian Andes. They told him about the strata (possibly oil-bearing) deep under the Amazon Basin hundreds or thousands of miles away. They also suggested that an ancient ice age once chilled the sea water right across the equator...
...Amazon region is tough to explore on the surface, and almost unknown geologically. But both the Amazon and the towering Andes were covered some 200 million years ago by the same shallow sea. An unexplained disturbance wrinkled the earth's crust. The western part of the sea bottom was lifted high in the air, where its sedimentary strata lie exposed today. The rest (toward the east) is still deeply buried under the tangled jungle...
...Amazon sea apparently extended from eastern Brazil to islands on the present site of the Andes. It was not a tropical sea, but temperate, since the animals that lived in it are characteristic of cool water. It must have extended without a break right past the equator and into the region of the present Mississippi Valley. In those .days the same shellfish lived in Peru and in Oklahoma...
...this was good news for the oil companies. Petroleum is believed to come from the dead bodies of minute animals sinking to the bottom of shallow seas. If the same marine fauna flourished in both the U.S. and South America, there should be good oil prospects in the Amazon Basin as well as in Texas...
...UNESCO (designed to achieve peace by its influence on the minds of men) studied the jungles of the Amazon basin and other interesting matters...