Spanish Conquest May Have Altered Peru's Shoreline

sciencehabit (1205606) writes "The Spanish conquest of the Inca had a profound effect on Peru's indigenous people, but a new study reveals that it also had an unexpected impact on the land itself. Before the Spaniards arrived, inhabitants of the arid northern Peruvian coast clad massive sand dune-like ridges with an accidental form of 'armor': millions of discarded mollusk shells, which protected the ridges from erosion for nearly 4700 years and produced a vast corrugated landscape that is visible from space. This incidental landscape protection came to a swift end, however, after diseases brought by Spanish colonists decimated the local population and after colonial officials resettled the survivors inland. Without humans to create the protective covering, newly formed beach ridges simply eroded and vanished."

Comments

Weren't the Peruvians altering the coast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Weren't the Peruvians altering the coast (in a way that would not be allowed in US wetlands) and when the Spanish came the coast was returned to nature?

Re:Weren't the Peruvians altering the coast?

[sunking2]

It's ok when it's done by the indigenous people. It's only when the white man does it that it's bad.

Re:Weren't the Peruvians altering the coast?

[rmdingler]

Nothing against the white man, and full disclosure would reveal that my mother actually married one, but I'm just simple.

Anthropogenic anything is still nature's, and the universe's, hand at work...

Our super-sized egos aside, we are not separate from the rest of existence.

The Spanish Inquistion

[Irate Engineer]

I bet they weren't expecting that.

Re:The Spanish Inquistion

[DigiShaman]

That event was a more notable for historical and cultural reasons to European history. However, most of the deaths were caused by diseases and civil war.

While numbers are unavailable, Spanish records indicate that the population was so devastated by disease that their forces could hardly be resisted. However, whether the illness of the 1520s was actually smallpox has been contested; a minority of scholars claim that the epidemic was actually due to an indigenous illness called Carrion's disease. In any case, a study by N. D. Cook, the results of which were published in 1981, show that the Andes suffered from three separate population declines during colonization. The first was of 30–50 percent during the first outbreak of smallpox. Then, when smallpox was followed with the measles, another decline of 25–30 percent occurred. Finally, when smallpox and measles appeared together, which occurred from 1585 to 1591, a decline of 30–60 percent occurred. Collectively these declines amounted to a decline of 93 percent from the population pre-contact in the Andes region.[15]

When Pizarro arrived in Peru in 1532, he found it vastly different from when he had been there just five years before. Amid the ruins of the city of Tumbes, he tried to piece together the situation before him. From two young local boys who he had taught how to speak Spanish in order to translate for him, Pizarro learned of the civil war and of the disease that was destroying the Inca Empire.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Visible from Space

[Anonymous Coward]

Protip: If you are going to submit an article about something "visible from space", you should have a picture of said something taken from space.