have a look at this,
this is a photograph by the Ministerio
de Turismo Ecuador of the San Rafael Waterfall, one of Ecuador’s most popular tourist attraction, as part of the Cayambe Coca National Park, in the Ecuadorian
Amazon rainforest, the San Rafael Waterfall reportedly attracted tens of
thousands of tourists every year. That’s all in the past, though, as the
impressive 150-meter-high waterfall all but stopped flowing on February 2nd,
after a mysterious sinkhole formed on the river fueling it, diverting the water
into three small streams, all tourism to the site has been closed and the
waterfall doesn’t even show up on Ecuador’s official travel website anymore,
“A waterfall that has been there for thousands of years does not collapse, coincidentally, a few years after opening a hydroelectric project,” Emilio Cobo, coordinator of the South America Water Program at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, told Mongabay. “These are processes that are in scientific papers and there is sufficient evidence that a dam can cause effects of this type on a river.”
on the other side of the coin, geologists like Alfredo Carrasco say that the
waterfall was located in an area of volcanic activity, so it is likely that its
collapse was a natural phenomenon, albeit one never recorded in the history of
Ecuador, although the river still flows under an arch that survived
the collapse of the land, seen from the place where it used to be photographed,
the San Rafael Waterfall has virtually disappeared, so natural disaster or man made drought, caused by the near by completed dam? you decide!
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