How did the Amazon River get to be so big?

The first reason has to do with its location - right at the equator. Around the "belt line" of the earth lies a warm, tropical zone where over 400 in/1016cm of rain fall every year. That averages out to more than an inch (3cm) of rain, everyday! A lot of water falls onto the land surrounding the river, what is called the "Amazon River drainage basin". A good way to understand what a drainage basin is to think of the whole northern half of the continent of South America as a shallow dish, or saucer. Whenever rain falls and lands anywhere in the river basin it all runs into the lowest place in the pan, which happens to be the Amazon River. The sheer volume of rain in the Amazon jungle, as well as the slope of the surrounding land, combine to create the enormous river known as the Amazon. http://bit.ly/b1w3gY

The Great Amazon River

"Everything about the Amazon staggers the imagination. As one approaches Pará from the Atlantic, the banks of the southern, smaller mouth of the river are 150 miles apart. The island of Marajo, one of several in the mouth, is half the size of Ireland. The province of Pará, with a capital city also called Pará and with a population then [1865] of fifteen thousand, is the size of western Europe. The Amazon, with a flood-stage discharge ten times that of the Mississippi, has the greatest flow of any river on earth, accounting for 20% of all the water that runs into the oceans. It is so large that most of the lower river seems not like a river at all but like freshwater sea. For a hundred miles inland the river is indistinguishable from the ocean except for its calmness and its discolored water. There is little visible current; the slope of the lower river is a fifth of an inch per mile. Three hundred and fifty miles up, the Amazon is still forty miles wide. It is four thousand miles long, with a thousand tributaries, some of which are themselves a thousand miles long, and several are twenty miles wide where they meet the main river."

from William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson

Tagua Nut in Contemporary Design

Christiane Theise is a German artist who carves tagua nut (vegetable ivory) into the most amazing jewelry.

 

The tagua nut is the seed of the Phytelephas macrocarpa, a low South American palm. When the seed is mature it has a similar density and color as animal  ivory -- thus its nickname "vegetable ivory." In the 1900's it was exported for the manufacture of buttons, but after the Second World War it was replaced by plastic buttons. 

Coco Bells in the Daily Art Muse Blog

The DailyArtMuse was established in 2006 by Susan Lomuto. It has an incredible selection of contemporary handcrafted excellence. It is truly inspiring -- check it out. http://dailyartmuse.com/
This is one of the designs featured today -- the splash ring:

New Pendant

Is the coconut a nut, a fruit, or a seed?

nut:
a fruit consisting of a hard or tough shell around an edible kernel.

fruit: the sweet and fleshy product of a tree or other plant that contains seed and can be eaten as food.


seed:
a flowering plant's unit of reproduction, capable of developing into another such plant.

A nut is a fruit, so the coconut is all three.

But botanically (technically) speaking, the coconut fruit is a drupe, not a true nut. A drupe is a fruit with a hard stony covering enclosing the seed (much like a peach or olive.) Like other fruits it has three layers: exocarp, mesocarp, and endocarp. The exocarp and mesocarp together make up the husk, and the mesocarp is composed of fibers called coir. The endocarp or shell is the hardest part of the coconut. The shell has three germination pores (stoma) or eyes that are clearly visible on its outside surface once the husk is removed.

Dendemona

I think that when one starts giving their necklaces a name... I'm not sure... But it could be a sign...

The seed in this pendant is called dendê - therefore, this is Dendemona.

Dendemona's little skirt is made with bronze freshwater pearls and brass.

If you would like to know more, go to http://bit.ly/ak3SxR.

Good News

"Brazil and the United States Sign Debt-for-Nature Agreement to Conserve Tropical Forests"

For the next five years, the U.S. will reduce Brazil's debt payments by $21million. Brazil will use this money to fund conservation projects in the tropical forests.