The wells are not normally visible to those on the ISS, but fall in sunlight through sunlight.
The statue shows the Inambari River and a number of pits surrounded by deforested areas with muddy loot.
Independent gold mining supports tens of thousands of people in the Madre de Dios region, making it one of the largest unregistered mining industries in the world, according to NASA.
Mining is also the largest driver of deforestation in the region, and mercury is used to pollute gold water, the agency added.
Gold exploration in the region has expanded since the inauguration of the Southern Interoceanic Highway in 2011 made the area more accessible.
The only road link between Brazil and Peru was intended to promote trade and tourism, but ‘deforestation is perhaps the bigger consequence of the highway’, NASA said.
The photo, released earlier this month, was taken on December 24.
Madre de Dios is a pristine piece of Amazon about the size of South Carolina, where macaws and monkeys, jaguars and butterflies thrive. But while some parts of Madre de Dios, such as the Tambopata National Reserve, are protected from mining, hundreds of square miles of rainforest in the area have been turned into a treeless, poisonous desert.
Rises in the price of gold in recent years have created jungle tree towns, complete with pop-up brothels and gun battles, as tens of thousands of people from all over Peru have joined a modern gold rush.
According to the group Monitoring of the Andes Amazon Project, known as MAAP, a scientific study in January 2019 found that deforestation of gold mining in 2018 destroyed approximately 22,930 hectares of the Amazon in Peru. This is the highest annual total recorded until 1985, based on research conducted by Wake Forest University’s Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation.
Deforestation in 2018 obscured the previous record high of 2017, when an estimated 22,635 hectares of forest were cut down by gold miners, according to MAAP.
This means that gold mining over two years has reduced the equivalent of more than 34,000 US football fields in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest, according to MAAP’s analysis.