Galápagos Islands

The Galápagos Islands (in Spanish: Islas Galápagos) are an archipelago of volcanic islands in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean (ETPO). The islands, located around the equator and approximately 900 km (560 mi) west of the mainland of South America, form Ecuador's Galápagos Province. All of the islands of the archipelago are protected as part of Ecuador's Galápagos National Park and Galápagos Marine Reserve.

Quotes

  • This archipelago consists of ten principal islands, of which five exceed the others in size. They are situated under the Equator, and between five and six hundred miles westward of the coast of America. They are all formed of volcanic rocks; a few fragments of granite curiously glazed and altered by the heat, can hardly be considered as an exception. Some of the craters, surmounting the larger islands, are of immense size, and they rise to a height of between three and four thousand feet. Their flanks are studded by innumerable smaller orifices. I scarcely hesitate to affirm, that there must be in the whole archipelago at least two thousand craters. These consist either of lava or scoriae, or of finely-stratified, sandstone-like tuff. Most of the latter are beautifully symmetrical; they owe their origin to eruptions of volcanic mud without any lava: it is a remarkable circumstance that every one of the twenty-eight tuff-craters which were examined, had their southern sides either much lower than the other sides, or quite broken down and removed. As all these craters apparently have been formed when standing in the sea, and as the waves from the trade wind and the swell from the open Pacific here unite their forces on the southern coasts of all the islands, this singular uniformity in the broken state of the craters, composed of the soft and yielding tuff, is easily explained.
    Considering that these islands are placed directly under the equator, the climate is far from being excessively hot; this seems chiefly caused by the singularly low temperature of the surrounding water, brought here by the great southern Polar current. Excepting during one short season, very little rain falls, and even then it is irregular; but the clouds generally hang low. Hence, whilst the lower parts of the islands are very sterile, the upper parts, at a height of a thousand feet and upwards, possess a damp climate and a tolerably luxuriant vegetation. This is especially the case on the windward sides of the islands, which first receive and condense the moisture from the atmosphere.
  • The Galapagos Islands are well known for their natural beauty and unique wildlife (60% of all organisms are endemic). As on most oceanic islands the native animals show little or no fear of man. These features make the archipelago very attractive for tourism and since 1970 many people have come to see this ‘last paradise’. Initially the flow of visitors caused few problems. Since 1979, however, the pressure on the fragile ecosystems has increased rapidly and there is great danger that the archipelago will become another ‘lost paradise’.
  • The Galápagos Islands arose as a series of violent volcanic eruptions from a convulsing deep ocean floor on the northeastern section of the Nazca plate. Slowly the islands grew, seething and fuming rising in fiery violence above the surface of the central eastern Pacific in awe-inspiring desolation. In this astonishing isolation they came to harbor living organisms found nowhere else on Earth. Though the islands appear to have no close geologic affinities with the mainland of North and South America, their native fauna and flora derive in the main from the American tropics.
  • The Galapagos Islands are a global hotspot of environmental change. However, despite their potentially major repercussions, little is known about current and expected changes in regional terrestrial climate variables and sea surface temperatures (SST). Here, by analysing existing meteorological observations and secondary datasets, we find that the Islands have warmed by about 0.6 °C since the early 1980s, while at the same time becoming drier. In fact, the onset of the wet season is currently delayed 20 days. This drying trend may reverse, however, given that future climate projections for the region suggest mean annual precipitation may increase between 20 and 70%. This would also be accompanied by more extreme wet and hot conditions. Further, we find that regional SST has increased by 1.2 °C over the last two decades. These changes will, in turn, translate into deterioration of marine ecosystems and coral, proliferation of invasive species, and damages to human water, food, and infrastructure systems. Future projections, however, may be overestimated due to the poor capacity of climatic models to capture Eastern-Pacific ENSO dynamics. Our findings emphasize the need to design resilient climate adaptation policies that will remain robust in the face of a wide range of uncertain and changing climatic futures.
  • The peculiar character of the Vegetation on the Galapagos Islands was brought to scientific attention in 1847 by Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker. His flora of the archipelago, based chiefly upon the collections of Charles Darwin, showed clearly that these islands, although small in extent, volcanic in character, and only five hundred to six hundred miles from Ecuador, possess a vegetation striking in individuality and very unlike that of the adjacent mainland. Darwin, who visited the Galapagos on the memorable voyage of the " Beagle," landed on four of the islands (Chatham, Charles, James, and Albemarle). He was able to spend only a few days upon each, and naturally much of his attention was devoted to the general topography, the geology, and especially the peculiar fauna; moreover the season was one of drought; yet he was able to collect 201 different plants. These, supplemented by smaller collections (chiefly those of Douglas & Scouler, Macrae, and Edmondston), enabled Hooker to include in his enumeration 239 species, of which no less than 107 were described as new to science, thus indicating an extraordinary endemic element of nearly forty-five per cent of the whole flora of the islands, a proportion which became still more remarkable when the imperfectly represented thallophytes, and certain phanerogams, believed to be artificially introduced weeds, were omitted from consideration.
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