You are reading a single comment by @ewanmac and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@ewanmac
Lots of possible scenarios as to how they might have got equipment in. The most likely is floating it up the network of small rivers under the canopy. If you zoom out a bit, you can see what look like 'crinkles' in the landscape and those are often small river channels, one of them runs very close to the site. In fact it looks like it may be connected to the Rio Curimata de Baixo just to the north. Also, you wouldn't necessarily need a lot of equipment. A lot of illegal mining is small scale and artisanal. I've been in an illegal gold mine in Cambodia that was probably bigger, and certainly less remote than the one shown here, but about the only heavy machinery they had was a generator (although I couldn't see what it was powering... maybe a water pump). Most of the work was done manually, and the mine was home to a tented camp of about 100 people.
Another interesting aside is that if you zoom out a bit, you can see that the texture of the forest is slightly different (slightly smoother) in two patches extending ENE and WSW of the camp. I don't know but my guess is that this shows that the larger trees have been removed from these areas. Either way, one of the clever ways that the computer algorithms designed to identify deforestation work is that they try to identify these smoother areas where the large trees have been slectively removed. However, last time I talked to someone who knows about this, they were still a long way behind the human eye.