andes

A team including University of Wyoming anthropologists works at the site of a circular plaza that was built around 4,750 years ago in the Cajamarca Basin of northern Peru. Credit: Jason Toohey Two University of Wyoming anthropology professors have discovered one of the earliest circular plazas in Andean South America, showcasing monumental megalithic architecture, which refers to construction that uses large stones placed…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeA chilling real life vs fiction image of the Andes plane wreckage depicted in Society of the Snow has been shared online.The “harrowing” new film from director JA Bayona (The Impossible, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) charts the incredible survival of passengers whose plane crashed in the Andes mountains in 1972.Based on a 2008 book of the same name by Pablo Vierci, Society of the…

Nervous flyers, look away now. The Spanish director JA Bayona (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom; The Impossible) brings his considerable skills as an action director to the much-filmed real-life story of the crash of Uruguayan air force flight 571 in the icy peaks of the Andes in 1972. The incident, and the subsequent 72-day ordeal of the survivors, who had to resort to cannibalism, has been the subject of numerous documentaries and movies (including Frank Marshall’s Alive). But for the visceral, teeth-rattling intensity of…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeThe Andes disaster, or miracle depending on how full your glass is, needs little introduction. The 1972 calamity – in which a plane carrying 45 people, including an amateur rugby team from Uruguay, crashed in the South American wilderness – has been the subject of books, documentaries and multiple films, the most famous of which, Alive, starred Ethan Hawke in 1993. Now, it is getting…

Focusing on the Lake Titicaca Basin in the Andes mountains, a team of anthropologists found through analysis of 1,179 projectile points that the rise of archery technology dates to around 5,000 years ago. Credit: Luis Flores-Blanco When did archery arise in the Americas? And what were the effects of this technology on society? These questions have…

Mountain road in Chile. Credit: INRAE High mountain regions often face a multitude of natural hazards, the combined effects of which, known as "cascading hazards," can have serious consequences for infrastructure and urban areas. However, there is a lack of tools to prevent and quantify these complex risks. That's why researchers…

As temperatures climb, so does violence. At least that's the conclusion reached by researchers looking at how ancient cultures in the south central Andes responded to climate change about 1,000 years ago. It may be an important cautionary tale.Rising sea levels. An expanding troposphere. An increase in the spread of disease-carrying mosquitoes. Even harsher allergy seasons and disrupted sleep patterns. As if we didn't already have enough to worry about from climate change, a new study out of UC Davis says that when the…

Frailejones (Espeletia sp.) in Monquentiva, a member of the daisy family (Asteraceae) common in the Colombian páramo. Credit: F. Pym 2022Fungal spores discovered in dung have unveiled that megafauna experienced two distinct extinction “waves” in the Colombian Andes. Coprophilous fungi spores, which are integral to the life cycle of large animals weighing over 45 kg, pass through the digestive systems of these creatures. Consequently, the presence of such spores in sediment samples indicates that these sizable animals once…

By any measure, the Andes mountains are very, very big. Running for some 8,900 kilometers (5,530 miles) through South America, they reach up to 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) in height and stretch up to 700 kilometers (435 miles) in width.But how did the range grow to this gigantic scale? Plate tectonics – the movement of great slabs of Earth's crust across the planet – can create mountain ridges as slower sections are forced up by faster moving regions.Though the concept is simple in theory, tracking the speed of tectonic…

Aerial view of the study region in the Argentine Andes. Credit: J.R. SlossonThe Earth is constantly subjected to an overwhelming influx of cosmic rays — subatomic particles that are undetectable to the human eye and originate from sources such as the sun and supernova explosions. As these high-energy cosmic rays, which have traveled great distances, make their way into the Earth’s atmosphere, they collide with atoms and trigger a chain reaction of secondary cosmic rays.When the secondary cosmic rays reach the topmost…