The text coming next was submitted to study through activities such as reading and interpretation, aiming at featuring
language’s referential function in a practical way, since its author focuses on:
A survey released on Thursday (18) by MapBiomas shows that, in 2022, 77% of the illegal mining areas in the Brazilian
Amazon were less than 500 meters away from water streams, such as rivers and lakes. According to satellite images recently
revealed, the Amazon had 186,000 hectares of illegal mining areas near water streams, out of a total of 241,000 hectares
occupied by illegal miners (known in Brazil as “garimpeiros”) in the region. At the time, the Amazon accounted for 92% of all
the area mined in the country.
“The proximity of gold mines to watercourses is the DNA of mining activities in the Amazon, especially gold, which is
almost always linked to rivers and their alluvial deposits. While deforestation is confined to the area mined, the siltation caused
by mining near the edges of rivers and other water streams coupled with the contamination of water by mercury, and more
recently by cyanide, reach much larger areas,” said Cesar Diniz, a technical coordinator of mining mapping at MapBiomas. The
survey also showed that around 10% of the area mined in the Amazon (25,100 hectares) is located within Indigenous Lands,
especially in the Kayapó, Munduruku and Yanomami lands. MapBiomas points out that Indigenous lands are the best-preserved
areas in the Amazon: from 1985 to 2022, they lost less than 1% of their native vegetation, compared to 26% recorded in private
areas.
(Available in: https://www.brasildefato.com.br/. Accessed in: April/2014.)