Showing posts with label Brazil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brazil. Show all posts

Saturday, 22 February 2014

Sunset aaat Ipanema Beach, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil:


Ipanema is a neighborhood located in the South Zone of the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, between Leblon and Arpoador. The beach at Ipanema became widely known by the song "The Girl from Ipanema", written by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes.Most of the land that Ipanema consists of today once belonged to José Antonio Moreira Filho, Baron of Ipanema. The word "Ipanema" did not refer originally to the beach, but to the homeland of the baron at São Paulo.Ipanema gained fame with the start of the bossa nova sound, when its residents Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes created their ode to their neighborhood, "Girl from Ipanema." The song was written in 1962, with music by Jobim and Portuguese lyrics by de Moraes with English lyrics written later by Norman Gimbel. Its popularity has seen a resurgence with Diana Krall's song "Boy from Ipanema" released in 2008.[citation needed]Posto 9's tradition began around 1980 when the present deputy Fernando Gabeira, came back from his political exile in France and was photographed there in a thong. He had been a political terrorist who, with his MR-8 mates, kidnapped the American ambassador in the sixties to release some political prisoners in Brazil, that was under a dictatorship at that time. In the eighties he became a political celebrity and his picture appeared on the front pages of all Brazilian newspapers together with his declarations that he was bisexual. His going to the beach at that spot made it famous throughout the country.It inherited the status of a "cool and alternative" space in Ipanema beach from the area next to a pier that was demolished in the seventies, near Farme de Amoedo Street. It has a long history of pot smoking, police raids, and left-wing, as well as alternative, gatherings.

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Wednesday, 29 January 2014



Amazon Rainforest in Brazil:


The Amazon rainforest, also known in English as Amazonia or the Amazon Jungle, is a moist broadleaf forest that covers most of the Amazon Basin of South America. This basin encompasses 7,000,000 square kilometres , of which 5,500,000 square kilometres are covered by the rainforest. This region includes territory belonging to nine nations. The majority of the forest is contained within Brazil, with 60% of the rainforest, followed by Peru with 13%, Colombia with 10%, and with minor amounts in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. States or departments in four nations contain "Amazonas" in their names. The Amazon represents over half of the planet's remaining rainforests, and comprises the largest and most biodiverse tract of tropical rainforest in the world, with an estimated 390 billion individual trees divided into 16,000 species.The rainforest likely formed during the Eocene era. It appeared following a global reduction of tropical temperatures when the Atlantic Ocean had widened sufficiently to provide a warm, moist climate to the Amazon basin. The rain forest has been in existence for at least 55 million years, and most of the region remained free of savanna-type biomes at least until the current ice age, when the climate was drier and savanna more widespread.Following the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, the extinction of the dinosaurs and the wetter climate may have allowed the tropical rainforest to spread out across the continent. From 66–34 Mya, the rainforest extended as far south as 45°. Climate fluctuations during the last 34 million years have allowed savanna regions to expand into the tropics. During the Oligocene, for example, the rainforest spanned a relatively narrow band that lay mostly above latitude 15°N. It expanded again during the Middle Miocene, then retracted to a mostly inland formation at the last glacial maximum.However, the rainforest still managed to thrive during these glacial periods, allowing for the survival and evolution of a broad diversity of species.During the mid-Eocene, it is believed that the drainage basin of the Amazon was split along the middle of the continent by the Purus Arch. Water on the eastern side flowed toward the Atlantic, while to the west water flowed toward the Pacific across the Amazonas Basin. As the Andes Mountains rose, however, a large basin was created that enclosed a lake; now known as the Solimões Basin. Within the last 5–10 million years, this accumulating water broke through the Purus Arch, joining the easterly flow toward the Atlantic.There is evidence that there have been significant changes in Amazon rainforest vegetation over the last 21,000 years through the Last Glacial Maximum and subsequent deglaciation. Analyses of sediment deposits from Amazon basin paleolakes and from the Amazon Fan indicate that rainfall in the basin during the LGM was lower than for the present, and this was almost certainly associated with reduced moist tropical vegetation cover in the basin.There is debate, however, over how extensive this reduction was. Some scientists argue that the rainforest was reduced to small, isolated refugia separated by open forest and grassland;other scientists argue that the rainforest remained largely intact but extended less far to the north, south, and east than is seen today.This debate has proved difficult to resolve because the practical limitations of working in the rainforest mean that data sampling is biased away from the center of the Amazon basin, and both explanations are reasonably well supported by the available data.More than half of the dust needed for fertilizing the Amazon rainforest is provided by the Bodélé depression in Sahara. Up to 50 million tonnes per year are windblown across the Atlantic Ocean.


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Tuesday, 21 January 2014



Drive over the trees,at the rodovia dos imigrantes Highway,Brazil:


Rodovia dos Imigrantes is a highway in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. The highway connects the city of São Paulo to the Atlantic coast and with the seaside cities of São Vicente and Praia Grande. It follows the route of Rodovia Anchieta and is also one of Brazil's busiest highways, especially on weekends.Rodovia dos Imigrantes has 44 viaducts, 7 bridges, and 11 tunnels, along its 58.5 km stretch. The highway has recently been expanded, in one of the most audacious feats of Brazilian highway engineering, with extremely long tunnels and high strutting six-lane bridges constructed over the tropical rain forest which covers the steep faces of the Serra do Mar, the cliff range that separates the São Paulo plateau from the seaside lowlands. During sunny weekends, more than 1 million automobiles commonly cross its near 60 km run, separating the city of São Paulo from the sea.Rodovia dos Imigrantes was inaugurated in 1974, due to traffic saturation on Rodovia Anchieta. Although longer than Anchieta, Rodovia dos Imigrantes is nowadays busier due to its building standards, which permit higher speed limits, and its more direct path to the cities of Santos and Guarujá, the northern coast, as well as the southern coast (with cities Praia Grande, Mongaguá, and Itanhaém.Meaning "immigrants' highway" in Portuguese, Rodovia dos Imigrantes was so named as a way to remember the contribution of immigrants to the cultural, economic, and social development of Brazil.It is managed by a state concession to the private company, Ecovias, which also maintains Rodovia Anchieta; it is, therefore, a toll road.The two carriageways of Rodovia dos Imigrantes are both fully reversible and traffic is managed to flow either bidirectionally or unidirectionally, depending on demand. In the unidirectional mode, the opposing traffic is diverted to Rodovia Anchieta.

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Thursday, 19 December 2013



Rio de Janeiro , Brazil:


Rio de Janeiro, commonly referred to simply as Rio,is the capital city of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city of Brazil, and the third largest metropolitan area and agglomeration in South America, boasting approximately 6.3 million people within the city proper,making it the 6th largest in the Americas, and 26th in the world.Part of the city has been designated as a World Heritage Site, named "Rio de Janeiro: Carioca Landscapes between the Mountain and the Sea", identified by UNESCO on 1 July 2012 in the category Cultural Landscape.Founded in 1565, by the Portuguese, the city was initially the seat of the Captaincy of Rio de Janeiro, a captaincy of the Portuguese Empire. It later, in 1793, became the capital of the State of Brazil, a State of the Portuguese Empire. In 1808, when the Portuguese Royal Court transferred itself from Portugal to Brazil, Rio de Janeiro became the chosen seat of the court of Queen Maria I of Portugal, who subsequently, in 1815, under the leadership of her son, the Prince Regent, and future King João VI of Portugal, raised Brazil to the dignity of a kingdom, within the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and Algarves. Rio stayed the capital of the pluricontinental Lusitanian monarchy until 1822, when the War of Brazilian Independence began. It subsequently served as the capital of the independent monarchy, the Empire of Brazil, until 1889, and then the capital of a republican Brazil until 1960.Rio de Janeiro represents the second largest GDP in the country,estimated at about R$343 billion, and is headquarters to two of Brazil's major companies—Petrobras and Vale, and major oil companies and telephony in Brazil, besides the largest conglomerate of media and communications companies in Latin America, the Globo Organizations. The home of many universities and institutes, it is the second largest center of research and development in Brazil, accounting for 17% of national scientific production—according to 2005 data.Rio de Janeiro is one of the most visited cities in the southern hemisphere and is known for its natural settings, carnival celebrations, samba, Bossa Nova, balneario beaches such as Barra da Tijuca, Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon. Some of the most famous landmarks in addition to the beaches include the giant statue of Christ the Redeemer atop Corcovado mountain, named one of the New Seven Wonders of the World; Sugarloaf mountain with its cable car; the Sambódromo, a permanent grandstand-lined parade avenue which is used during Carnival; and Maracanã Stadium, one of the world's largest football stadiums.The 2016 Summer Olympics and the Paralympics will take place in Rio de Janeiro, which will mark the first time a South American or a Portuguese-speaking nation hosts the event. It will be the third time the Olympics will be held in a Southern Hemisphere city.On 12 August 2012, at the 2012 Summer Olympics closing ceremony, Mayor Eduardo Paes received the Olympic Flag, via Jacques Rogge, from London Mayor Boris Johnson. Rio's Maracanã Stadium, which held the final of the 1950 FIFA World Cup, will host the final match of the 2014 FIFA World Cup.Rio de Janeiro also hosted the World Youth Journey in 2013.

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Thursday, 17 October 2013

Massive Wave, Brazil:


The wave is an example of metachronal rhythm achieved in a packed stadium when successive groups of spectators briefly stand, yell, and raise their arms. Immediately upon stretching to full height, the spectator returns to the usual seated position.The result is a wave of standing spectators that travels through the crowd, even though individual spectators never move away from their seats. In many large arenas the crowd is seated in a contiguous circuit all the way around the sport field, and so the wave is able to travel continuously around the arena; in discontiguous seating arrangements, the wave can instead reflect back and forth through the crowd. When the gap in seating is narrow, the wave can sometimes pass through it. Usually only one wave crest will be present at any given time in an arena. Simultaneous, counter-rotating waves have been produced.While there is general disagreement about the precise origin of the wave, most stories of the phenomenon's origin suggest that the wave first started appearing at North American sporting events during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Canadian sports fans make claims of having created waves during the late 1970s at the 1976 Montreal Olympics,National Hockey League games in Canada, and at Vancouver Whitecaps games, where crowds were alleged to have performed the wave for a commercial in which the slogan was "Catch the Wave."Krazy George Henderson led a wave in October 15, 1981 at a Major League Baseball game in Oakland, California.This wave was broadcast on TV, and George owns a videotape of the event, which he uses to bolster his claim as the inventor of the wave. On October 31, 1981, a wave was created at a UW football game in Seattle, and the cheer continued to appear during the rest of that year's football season.Although the people who created the first wave in Seattle acknowledge Krazy George's wave at a baseball stadium, they claim to have popularized the phenomenon, since Krazy George's wave was a one-time event.There is also an unconfirmed claim that on June 24, 1981, while waiting for President Ronald Reagan to take the podium at the U.S.A. Jaycees National Convention at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio, Texas, the Jaycee members and their guests – about 10,000 people – began doing the wave.It lasted for about three or four minutes before the Secret Service requested that they stop, presumably because it made it difficult to monitor the crowd.Many claim that the first wave originated in Seattle at the University of Washington's Husky Stadium on October 31, 1981,at the prompting of Dave Hunter and Robb Weller. Contrary to Weller's account, former Washington yell leader Tolly Allen has also claimed credit for the first wave. Weller, a Washington graduate, was the guest yell-king during the Huskies' homecoming football game against the Stanford University Cardinal. Weller's initial concept for the wave was for it to travel vertically, from the bottom of the stands to the top, within the UW student section. Weller claimed to have done this at games when he was yell king. When that was met with limited interest, Weller then came up with the idea to move the wave from top to bottom.This failed miserably, as it was necessary to turn backward to see the wave progressing downward. Weller then gave up and returned his attention to the game. However, some fans, including Lee Eckmann and Bob Erickson, including Dave Hunter, toward the open end of the stadium on the student side started yelling "sideways". Weller did not hear them, but the students tried to initiate a "sideways" wave on their own. After a few attempts, and more yelling of "sideways" by students, Weller took notice. He instructed the UW cheerleaders to stand at different sections of the stadium and they in turn instructed the fans to stand up when Weller ran past.He moved along the track toward the open end of the stadium, then ran along the track toward the closed end of the stadium, in front of the student section. After a couple of tries, this caught on, and continued around the entire Husky Stadium, and was repeated throughout the rest of the game and the season. Longtime UW band director Bill Bissell also claimed co-creator credit with Weller, suggesting that the wave was devised by both of them prior to the game. The following week, the wave appeared at Seattle Seahawks professional football games in the Kingdome. While the exact origins of the wave may be in dispute, Seattle was the first place to routinely perform it. It became ubiquitous at every single sporting event in the area in the early 80s, and it has been a staple of Seattle sports ever since.

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