In Mozambique, Google Earth has enabled the discovery of rainforest. This is a stroke of luck for scientists.
You know I’m a big fan of series and movies. These include films that take brave heroes into the jungle. Undiscovered rainforests that no civilized person has ever entered, exotic animals and plants – all that automatically sounds like an adventure, doesn’t it?
However, such a film probably wouldn’t start with a scientist looking around on Google Earth. But that’s exactly what happened and the result is indeed an extraordinary adventure in which a team of 28 people were able to explore undiscovered and untouched ground for hundreds of years.
In his search for the untouched rainforest, Dr. Julian Bayliss found the largest rainforest in southern Africa at Monte Mabu. Google Earth was also a help at that time and now he repeated the trick. In Mozambique, not far from Monte Mabu, lies Monte Lico.
This extinct volcano houses untouched rainforest in its crater, which has to do with the fact that we are dealing with an island mountain. The 700-meter high mountain has an almost vertical ascending and 125-meter high cliff at the top, which one cannot climb without appropriate climbing equipment and practice.
This is the reason why nobody has entered this rainforest in the crater for hundreds of years. For the scientists around Dr. Bayliss, this is an absolute sensation. Mozambique has many of these forests, but according to the current state of knowledge, the now-climbed rainforest in Monte Lico has been the last untouched.
Science benefits because here you can see how this rainforest has developed compared to others. But you can not only see how the well-known rainforests differ from such a forest, where only nature itself has intervened, but there are also new flora and fauna to discover.
In May, the team went on this exciting trip, but Dr. Bayliss had already discovered this jungle in 2012. 6 full years were spent preparing for the expedition, assembling the right people. Part of the preparation was also a special training in climbing. Two climbing professionals were part of the team who took over this training.
The scientists can already look forward to the discovery of new species – the evaluation is still ongoing, of course. So a new mouse species was discovered and a new butterfly. By isolating the rainforest we can assume that further plants and animal species will be discovered here during the evaluation or future missions.
A caterpillar that will one day become a butterfly. (Photo: Jeffrey Barbee/Allianceearth.org)
Surprisingly, the scientists owe all their new insights and discoveries not only to Google Earth but also to the war that has reigned in the country. Mozambique was thrown back in terms of development because both industrialisation and the settlement of this part of the country were significantly slowed down in this way.
I think it is good that we have not seen everything there is to discover on this planet and I hope that in this case the Mozambican government will draw the right conclusions and make the right decisions to protect the rainforest. It would be even nicer if we could all appreciate the rainforest in general and if more would happen to protect it all over the world.
Yes, probably a pious wish, but in general I already have the impression that we humans are sensitized more and more to these topics and problems and that despite all human crimes against nature we think more and more often about sustainability.
Source: Alliance Earth via Quartz