Absolutely Galapagos , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - Fletcher David

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61 pages

English

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Absolutely Galapagos provides an insight into every feature of that famous archipelago - warts and all - and a further insight into the unique and confused mind of Brian. And, of course, he is more 'at sea' in this book than in any of those that have gone before... It has to be admitted that Brian's interest in the place that inspired Charles Darwin's ground-breaking On the Origin of Species was first inspired not by the islands themselves but by the image of a boat. He was simply enthralled at the prospect of sharing a two-week voyage at sea with fourteen other like-minded souls - and with Sandra, of course. So, off they both went - to discover that not only was the boat all they'd hoped it would be but also that the Galpagos Archipelago really was like nowhere else on Earth. His fourteen new companions hadn't, of course, expected Brian - and his thoughts on matters as diverse as the mystery of how classic literature was produced before the days of creative writing courses. Oh, and Sandra hadn't expected a daily Brian lecture on some of the more interesting aspects of every single country in South America...

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	28 mai 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781788032155
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	7 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

A bsolutely G alÁpagos

David Fletcher
Copyright © 2017 David Fletcher

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 9781788032155

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For Caroline
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By the same author:
2016

1.
The Hilton Colon Hotel in Quito wasn’t anything like its name might suggest. In fact, it was very pleasant indeed, and the only thing that was crappy was Brian’s knowledge of Spanish. Sandra’s was better, and it was she who pointed out to Brian that the Spanish version of the anglicised ‘Christopher Columbus’ is, of course, ‘Cristóbal Colón’, and that for their two-night stop in Quito, prior to their travelling to the Galápagos archipelago, they had been installed in the Hilton Columbus Hotel. This revelation brought embarrassment and relief to Brian in almost equal measure, but he also knew that from now on, however hard he tried, he would never be able to contemplate a certain hidden body part – and a certain not very desirable medical procedure – without also bringing to mind that famous explorer from the past. It was just the way he was and he could do nothing about it.
Anyway, it was now the evening of their second day in the Colon Hotel, and Brian and Sandra were in bed, both eager to shed the remains of their jet lag and so be in tip-top form for their journey tomorrow. Because tomorrow would see them flying off to their Gal á pagos destination, and there embarking on a two-week voyage around its ‘enchanted isles’. However, Sandra was still wide awake, and was now reading a book, and Brian was still wide awake – and reviewing their experiences so far.
These had kicked off yesterday when they had flown into Quito in the late afternoon (Quito time), and had thereafter just managed some alcoholic resuscitation before succumbing to sleep. Their experiences then recommenced about twelve hours later in the form of a city tour in the company of their fellow ‘Nature-seekers’, a dozen other souls who, like themselves, had booked a comprehensive circumnavigation of the Gal á pagos Islands – and did not necessarily have an intense interest in Spanish colonial architecture. Even if, in Quito, it was so good and so well preserved that it constituted a World Heritage Site. And quite right too. It was pretty impressive, albeit that under a clear blue sky (and at an altitude of 9,000ft), walking around it did entail a perilous exposure of certain sparsely covered scalps to the attention of an unrelenting tropical sun. Furthermore, there was also an exposure to the rather heavy-handed history of Catholicism in this land, probably at its worst in the gold-embellished interior of the Iglesia de la Compa ñ ia de Jes ú s, a ‘house of God’ that, despite God’s inclusive credentials, had originally been out of bounds to all but the upper-crustiest of Quito’s very Spanish establishment.
Understandably – at least from Brian’s perspective – it was something of a relief to abandon the cultural delights of the city in favour of its concentrated natural delights, in the form of Quito’s botanical gardens. Here was spent a pleasurable afternoon looking at all things botanical (and especially at a collection of orchids that must rank amongst the best in the world) – as well as witnessing nature in the raw. This episode of rawness was in the shape of a large blue wasp dragging off an enormous (paralysed) spider to its burrow, there presumably to use it as a living larder for its larvae, and in this way illustrate not the inclusive nature of God but his/her/its indifference to all forms of cruelty and suffering.
It was at this stage of his musings – when Brian realised that he’d been sidetracked into ‘philosophy’ – that he decided to abandon his brief review of his and Sandra’s time in Quito, and instead turn his attention to where they would soon be going. Yes, it was time to give some considered thought to the Gal á pagos Islands, and to start with, how they had come about – in geological terms.
Well, the first thing to bear in mind, he remembered, was that the Gal á pagos Islands had never been part of the South American continent. They sit about 1,000 kilometres off its coast, but they and the continent have never even been introduced to each other, let alone been joined in any way. This, of course, is because they are the result of volcanic activity and are largely the tips of vast submarine volcanoes – together with the occasional slab of basaltic rock uplifted from the ocean floor.
But that is to gloss over their genesis, and Brian thought that such is the remarkable nature of this genesis, that it warranted a rather more detailed exposition, starting with the fact that the Gal á pagos Islands are located at the ‘Gal á pagos Triple Junction’. This is nothing to do with some double bifurcation of the East Coast Mainline outside Banbury, but all to do with the confluence of three of the Earth’s tectonic plates: the Pacific Plate, the Cocos Plate and the Nazca Plate. Now, as all those who have not been subjected to the worst of faith schooling will know, tectonic plates are huge slabs of the Earth’s crust that are floating on a bed of liquid rock – or magma. Well, at the Gal á pagos Triple Junction, the Nazca Plate is on the move – east/south-eastwards – at a rate of just two centimetres a year (meaning that in Brian’s lifetime it had shifted east/south-east by a distance equivalent to just the length of his chest-waders – if one ignored the shoulder straps). However, as well as this movement – and intimately associated with it – there is a lot of heat. And this is because below the northern edge of the Nazca Plate is a ‘hotspot’. Nothing to do with Gal á pagos night-life but everything to do with a point in the Earth’s crust where the superheated magma beneath it is able to pierce its way through – and, in doing so, form massive volcanoes.
Right. Well, this hotspot is stationary. The ‘mantle plume’ that causes it is a fixed point in the Earth. So… if the plate above it is moving east/south-eastwards – albeit very slowly – then it follows that the volcanic islands created on it will themselves move – west/north-westwards – on a sort of geological ‘conveyer belt’. And this is exactly what is observed. (Although, as a human observer, you would be hard put to notice any movement, given that mere chest-waders-length shift in a lifetime.)
What can be observed, however, is that, of all the islands making up the present-day Gal á pagos Islands, those in the east are the oldest and those in the west the youngest. So, the south-eastern-most island, Española, is the great granddaddy of the ensemble, whereas Fernandina, to the west, is the real whippersnapper of the group at just 700,000 years old. So… to reinforce this location and age connection – in Brian’s tired mind – we have a collection of islands that began to be formed possibly eight million years ago (and are still being formed), where the more east they are the older they are, and the more distant they are from volcanic activity the more eroded they are. In fact, the old hotspot has probably been at it a lot longer than eight million years, with evidence in the form of undersea mountains and ridges to the east of the existing islands, which indicate that it may have been pushing out volcanic material for as much as the last ninety million years. That is to say, that ‘lost’ Gal á pagos islands emerged much earlier than those that still exist, and were then either eroded away entirely or found themselves underwater through the action of a (still observable) sagging in the Earth’s crust. And although it will take an interminably long time, the same fate awaits even those young thrusting islands to the west – such as Fernandina – whose presently sharply defined features will one day be smoothed down and then submerged beneath the waves.
At this point, Brian had a thought. And his thought was that if this hotspot kept up the good work for a few more hundreds of millions of years, the westward drift of the (above-water) Gal á pagos islands would eventually see them turning up in somewhere like Borneo. Or if they drifted off slightly southwards, then maybe they’d end up somewhere between Brisbane and Cairns, having first breached the Great Barrier Reef and the Australians’ confidence in their border controls. Or maybe, there again, the situation and action of other tectonic plates, of which Brian had no knowledge whatsoever, might just scupper that outcome, and the Gal á pagos might instead simply end up going around in circles – as he often did when he was jet-lagged but not quite tired enough to sleep.
Yes, perhaps it was time to abandon the challenge of geology and all that scientific sort of thinking, and focus instead on the history of the Gal á pagos Islands. And first their pre-h