You're listening to a special archive presentation of TED Talks Audio.

This talk features geoscientist Andres Rousseau, recorded live at TED Global 2014.

We're featuring this talk as a part of a special selection themed around journeys.

As a boy in Lima, my grandfather told me a legend of the Spanish conquest of Peru.

Atta wala, emperor of the Inca, had been captured and killed. Pizarro and his conquistadors

has grown rich, and tales of their conquest and glory had reached captured and killed. Pizarro and his conquistadors has grown rich, and tales of their

conquest and glory had reached Spain and was bringing new waves of Spaniards hungry for gold and glory.

They would go into towns and ask the Inca, where's another civilization we could conquer?

Where's more gold? And the Inca, out of vengeance, told them,

go to the Amazon.

You'll find all the gold you want there.

In fact, there is a city called Paititi, El Dorado in Spanish,

made entirely of gold.

The Spanish set off into the jungle, but the few that return come back with stories.

Stories of powerful shamans, of warriors with poisoned arrows, of trees so tall they blotted out the sun, spiders that ate birds, snakes that swallowed men whole,

and a river that boiled.

All this became a childhood memory.

And years passed, I'm working on my PhD at SMU,

trying to understand Peru's geothermal energy potential,

when I remember this legend, and I began asking that question, could the boiling river exist?

I asked colleagues from universities, the government, oil, gas and mining companies, and the answer was,

well, unanimous no. And this makes sense. You see, boiling rivers do exist in the world,

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