A MASSIVE new reef system has been found at the mouth of the Amazon River, the largest river by discharge of water in the world.

    Researchers were stunned to find the huge 9,300-square-km coral reef system below the muddy waters.

    The 600-mile (965-km) long reef, which ranges from about 30 to 120 meters deep and stretches from French Guiana to Brazil’s Maranhao state.

    Researchers say the find was not suspected because many of the world’s great rivers produce major gaps in reef systems, where no corals grow.

    The Amazon plume, an area where freshwater from the river mixes with the salty Atlantic Ocean, affects a broad area of the tropical North Atlantic Ocean in terms of salinity, pH, light penetration and sedimentation, conditions that usually correlate to a major gap in Western Atlantic reefs.

    The researchers say the reef appears to be thriving below the freshwater “plume,” or outflow, of the Amazon.

    Scientists say they found over 60 species of sponges, 73 species of fish, spiny lobsters, stars and much other reef life.

    “We brought up the most amazing and colorful animals I had ever seen on an expedition,” said Patricia Yager, an associate professor of marine sciences in the University of Georgia’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and principal investigator of the River-Ocean Continuum of the Amazon project.

    “Our expedition into the Brazil Exclusive Economic Zone was primarily focused on sampling the mouth of the Amazon,” said Yager. “But Dr. Moura had an article from the 1970s that mentioned catching reef fish along the continental shelf and said he wanted to try to locate these reefs.”

    The difficulty of finding the old map coordinates with modern GPS notwithstanding, the team used multibeam acoustic sampling of the ocean bottom to find the reef and then dredged up samples to confirm the discovery. The Brazilian researchers then organized a full team and took a Brazilian Navy research vessel back to the site in 2014, when they were able to collect and fully describe the findings for the study.(SD-Agencies)