Ascension 1

VulcanSpirit
Richard & Alison Brunstrom
Mon 15 Feb 2016 06:18
The VS has arrived at Ascension. This is a much younger island, less than a million years old and with volcanic activity ceasing only a few hundred years ago - possibly subsequent to its discovery by the Portuguese in 1501. It is mainly just bare lava and cinder; it is so young that not much life had got here before the Europeans. When Darwin arrived in 1836 he found just 25 species of higher plants (mostly ferns). Nowadays the island is home to a US airfield, a separate RAF base, an important BBC World Service transmitter, a European Space Agency tracking station and lots of covert signals intercept gear. The total population is about 800, none of whom have right of abode. There is one US flight every two weeks, two flights to the UK and Falklands every week and some intermittent and erratic shipping - the US supply ship has not turned up since October, leading to their diner running out of steaks.
Here are a few views:

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Above a small crater rim, with a cinder cone in the distance topped with some sort of radar dome.
Below a typical view of a cinder cone near the US airbase with our hire car. We've parked up to look at the amazing sooty tern colony and some endemic plants.

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The top of the island is greener:

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But this is all 'new'. When Darwin arrived the peaks were bare rocks with ferns and mosses. He advised importing suitable plants from South America and South Africa to create an artificial cloud forest which would attract precipitation and thus improve the water supply. This was done, and it works.

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Above is a view of one of the more recent lava flows, in black, emerging from the cinder cone in the distance. The pipeline is the water supply from the desalination plant run by the BBC's diesel generators and wind farm. The yellow patches in the far middle ground are the tees and 'greens' of the golf course - not a blade of grass anywhere to be seen. All the vegetation in view is introduced.
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