Iguazu Falls consist of about 270 waterfalls and cascades which plummet upto 269ft (the height of a 24 storey building), located on the Iguazu River which stretch in a horseshoe shape along 2 miles of area along the border of Argentina and Brazil.

Iguazu means “Big water” in Guaraní people language, and these Falls certainly live up to their name, and also inscribed in UNESCO’s World Heritage list in 1984 and 1986.

According to the natives legend says that a god intended to marry a beautiful lady named Naipú, who fled with her mortal lover in a canoe. In rage, the god sliced the river and creating the waterfalls, condemning the lovers to an eternal fall.

The real fact of how this marvelous waterfalls were formed is because the regional geology of the river Iguazu is characterized by the presence of a series of flows. The term “flows” is the name used to designate volcanic rock that originally flowed in liquid state under the surface of a solid layer and then cooled becoming solid.

These flows have successiely formed on top of each other and creating a “step”, like stairs, that could be a few millimetres to some meters in size, depending on the intensity of the phenomenon that caused it.

As the erosion process “backwards” continues, over the millenniums the falls will keep moving, as they have been moving since time immemorial and then resulting the magnificent shapes of todays Iguazu Falls.

The Iguazu Falls now part of the Iguazu national park where several endangered species are also live in. Some of the endangered species found in Iguazu national park are jaguar, jaguarundi, tapir, ocelot, anteater, pavas de monte, the Yacare Caiman, and a diversity of butterflies.

There also found birds species like the vencejo de cascada, tirica, the jungle eagle, vinaceous-breasted parrot, named for its wine-colored plumage and large toucans.

Via: Imagea.org, Iguazu Official site, Wikipedia, WWF.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 8:35 pm and is filed under Animal World, Environment, Travel, WWF. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.