Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the width of the Indian Ocean. He felt the surge of the wave sweeping him
towards the reef and then away again, but there was no damage to the reef
itself.
The compression waves from that far stronger earthquake had weakened
by the time they reached the Maldives, because that quake's epicenter had
been of the coast of Sumatra, 2500 kilometers away. But the tsunami had
caused a pattern of damage that was the mirror image of our Yap earthquake.
When Mike returned to Malé, the Maldivian capital, he found that the wave,
which had little ef ect on the surrounding reefs, had devastated the islands
themselves. More than a hundred people had been killed and 20,000 made
homeless as the islands were swept by the huge tsunami.
In this chapter we will see how a similar encounter with an earthquake
helped Charles Darwin formulate his theory of evolution. Then we will
explore the Earth's greatest current zone of earthquake and volcanic activ-
ity, to see how living things have reacted to geological upheavals large and
small. We will discover that life is astonishingly resilient, and has managed
to survive even the largest upheavals. And we will see how these upheavals
have provided new opportunities for evolution.
Darwin's jackhammer
Our little group of divers on Yap had been given a fresh reminder of the
immense forces that lie beneath our feet on this unstable planet. Charles
Darwin had a similar introduction to these forces, one that preceded ours by
almost two centuries. The huge forces that have shaped our world, and the
immense spans of time over which they have acted, were brought home to
Darwin during his voyage on the
Beagle
.
3
By the beginning of 1835 the crew of the
Beagle
had spent more than a year
mapping the complicated and dangerous channels and reefs of Cape Horn.
Their surveys, which were the fi rst to use chronometers to measure the pre-
cise longitude of these hazards, would save the lives of many voyagers. Now
the
Beagle
was leaving this area of wind and storms to begin a long journey of
exploration up the west coast of the South American continent.
