Look for the lonely clouds for an idea of the size of this chunk of Amazon Rainforest and Balbina Reservoir. Here, these unusual islands change in number from 1000 to over 3000 as the rainy season fluctuates water levels around 12m (40 feet).
This reservoir was formed in the 80’s along the Uatumã River by the completion of the Balbina Dam, built to provide electricity to the city of Manaus in the state of Amazonas, Brazil.
The key word here is pharaonic-or seemingly built with no use other than scale. 2360 square kilometers of pristine forest and indigenous territories were flooded, while only a quarter of the dam’s 250 megawatt capacity is now utilized due to low water levels. This is perhaps the worst ratio of flooded land to power output anywhere in the world. For comparison, the Hoover Dam floods up to 640 square kilometers, yet has a capacity of up to 2080 megawatts.
To make things worse, the hundreds of millions of decomposing trees under the reservoir continue to release so much methane that the entire operation is equivalent to emissions of over ten coal power plants, or half that of the mega city of Sāo Paulo.
Images from Sentinel-2, September 2019.
Satellite data from ESA’s Copernicus program. CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.