Terraformed in the 1800's: Ascension Island

POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Wednesday, June 17, 2020 03:52
VIEWED: 2765
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1KIKI

Tuesday, June 16, 2020 4:52 AM

The island with a key to our future

Scientists are looking to a 19th-Century terraform experiment on Ascension Island for clues on how to reverse negative global trends like deforestation and bush fires.
By Diane Selkirk

15 June 2020

From the sea, volcanic Ascension Island looks as if it’s smouldering. Big mid-Atlantic swell rolling up from the Southern Ocean explodes onto the rugged cinder and sand shoreline, leaving sea spray hanging in the air like steam. Inland, it’s all black lava and red rubble, a forbidding landscape that once earned the island the tourist-repelling descriptor of “hell with the fire put out”.

The mist that collects around the island’s highest peak completes the smoky illusion. Rising above a cataclysmic backdrop of dormant craters, pyroclastic deposits and lava domes, 859m-high Green Mountain is a leafy oddity on the charred island: its flourishing cloud forest is testament to both the ingenuity of humans and the resilience of nature.

Planted on a desolate hilltop less than 160 years ago, the forest that began on a whim has started attracting the notice of scientists around the world. Upending traditional ideas of conservation, Green Mountain offers the hopeful idea that man-made ecosystems can improve our environment. As the climate crisis ravages landscapes and leads to catastrophic damage – such as the recent bush fires in Australia – the thriving jungle on Ascension bolsters the argument that maybe we can regenerate a forest using concepts from this remote and often forgotten place.

Ascension Island erupted from the Atlantic Ocean about a million years ago. Located midway between Angola and Brazil, the island got it’s name when it was rediscovered by Afonso de Albuquerque on Ascension Day 1503 (it was first spotted by João da Nova in 1501). For a long time it was only occupied by nesting seabirds and green turtles that make the 3,000-mile journey from Brazil to breed. Its first human inhabitants came in 1815, when the British Royal Navy set up camp to keep watch on Napoleon, who was imprisoned 700 nautical miles south-east on Saint Helena.

Ascension went on to become a useful stopping point for ships. But during his visit in 1836, Charles Darwin pointed out the island’s most obvious flaw: its treeless, “naked hideousness” made it a tough place to live. Inspired by his friend Darwin’s theories about turning the arid landscape into a garden, botanist Joseph Hooker came up with a plan: by planting seedlings from around the world, trees could catch the mist and increase rainfall over the scorched island, making it livable.

The plan was a success. In 1860, John Bell, the island's horticulturalist, supervised the planting of some 27,000 trees and shrubs, which resulted in the development of enough soil to grow crops.

It was the opportunity to visit Darwin’s quirky and little-known forest, along with the mid-ocean promise of fresh raspberries and bananas, that drew my family to Ascension; an island that now has a population of around 900 people made up of American and British military and their civilian contractors.

Leaving our sailboat anchored in Clarence Bay, we drove our rental car out of Georgetown, along Nasa Road and through a blindingly bright lunarscape past the nightclub, the golf course, lava flows and volcanic craters and around the feral donkeys that were foraging in a desert of mesquite and prickly pear (later introduced by sailors).

Eventually we started up Green Mountain. Here the harsh sunlight was softened by mist and then blotted out by patchy rain. Then the road took us into a casuarina and acacia forest that could have come straight out of Australia. From there we drove into a dense jungle of bananas, ginger, juniper, raspberries, coffee, ferns and figs.

After pa

6IXSTRINGJACK

Tuesday, June 16, 2020 6:50 AM

You're going to have to start terraforming the moon and other planets if humanity is going to have a future.

Too many people.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

1KIKI

Tuesday, June 16, 2020 7:10 AM

If we can't control our numbers and terraform this planet, it's impossible we'd be able to do that anywhere else before we snuff our environment out.

For it to be an answer, ON TOP OF solving our own well-documented stupidities, in the near future we'd have to make sic-fi real w/ ftl transport AND find planets with gravity, radiation protection, and elemental composition compatible with our needs and limitations.

Your post is just plain stupid. Troll.

6IXSTRINGJACK

Tuesday, June 16, 2020 9:17 AM

Oh, sure. We would absolutely repeat our mistakes over and over again if we managed to leave the planet and terraform others.

If there's one thing we're really, really good at, it's repeating mistakes of the past and never learning from them.

*I'm looking at you, HBO for removing Gone With The Wind from your service... and anybody tearing down monuments you don't approve of.*

Do Right, Be Right. :)

1KIKI

Wednesday, June 17, 2020 3:50 AM

I've wondered why other places aren't used as sanctuaries for threatened species. The pampas might be good for zebras and wildebeests and giraffes and lions and cheetahs ... and even cancer-free Tasmanian devils. The S American jungles for gorillas and chimps and bonobos and elephants and rhinos. We could plant large areas of SoCal with eucalyptus for koalas. And plant areas of NE Australia with threatened tropical trees.

1KIKI

Wednesday, June 17, 2020 3:52 AM

Diego, the tortoise who saved his entire species, finally retires to uninhabited island

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/16/americas/diego-tortoise-retires-hom
e-scli-intl/index.html