But for every awesome eighties strike like Madonna , Donkey Kong or the Cabbage Patch Kids , there was a cringe - worthy counterbalance . mi - high bangs , mullet and bad permanent come to mind . Oh , and that one clip we humans erased one of the biggest waterfall on the planet . Just got free of it ! There was that , too .
At the cockcrow of the ' fourscore as it had been for millennia before , South America was home toGuairá Falls . The monolithic shower on the perimeter of Paraguay and Brazil was actually a series of herculean waterfalls that produced the nifty volume of falling water in the macrocosm .
( confessedly , The Democratic Republic of Congo ’s Boyoma Falls , a serial of super wide but very low and not - about - as - dramatic falls , the tallest of which throw only 16 fundament ( 5 meters , might quibble with that fact . )
To realise how the falls were laid out , train out this map of the site taken from the 1871 book " A unexampled Gateway to the Heart of South America . " The amount of mist generated by Guairá Falls created a perpetual rainbow when viewed from sealed angle . Although there were a totality of 18 waterfalls , the situation ’s alternative cognomen — Seven Falls — was a nod to seven of its most voluminous falls . The YouTube user - made video recording below compiles a number of vintage photos of the waterfalls :
The falls were formed by the Paraná River , which travel through the Maracaju / Mbaracuyú Mountains before entering progressively narrow-minded canyon wall , eventually encountering a funnel shape just 200 to 1,250 infantry ( 61 to 381 meters ) widely before moil over a precipice .
As the piss dropped 375 feet ( 114 meters ) , the deafen randomness could be learn at least 20 statute mile ( 32 kilometers ) away . That ’s not surprising , considering Guaira Falls was forecast to have twice the flow charge per unit of Niagara Falls on the U.S./Canada border .
Guairá Falls , which was once a major tourist attraction along the perimeter of Brazil and Paraguay , is now a placid lake behind a hydroelectric dekametre . The falls were submerged when the 4.8 - mileItaipu Damwas build downriver . The river , the seventh - big in the world , was hive off start up in 1978 . Approximately 10,000 families populate near the shoring of the river had to relocate .
On Oct. 13 , 1982 , the multi - phase project reached the point at which the decameter was closed , allowing the Paraná River toflood Guairá Falls . The first electrical energy was generated set out in 1984 , with the full decametre completed in 1991 . The Itaipu Dam now provides 75 pct of the electricity used by Paraguay and about 25 percentage of the electricity in Brazil — in total , enough topower the state of California .
The Itaipu decametre site , locate only 12.5 international mile ( 20 kilometers ) from the popular Igauzu Falls , stay a tourist attraction , though more as an image of industriousness . Think one day we could just shut off the dam and restore the drowned falls ? That ’s not possible , as the falls ' rock face was dynamited during the damming mental process , and the original geological structure that shaped the falls no longer subsist .
In 2014 , more than 856,000 peoplevisited the dam , some paying court not to the massive tycoon industrial plant , but to the website ’s former natural wonder .
