The whole island of La Palma is volcanic, but it’s extremely young. The oldest rocks are only about three million years old, so there’s no dinosaur fossils here. Much of the island is basalt – a dark grey rock which tends to form hexagonal columns, like the Giant’s Causeway or Los Organos on La Gomera. Over thousands of years it weathers to a lighter grey or brownish-grey. The red rocks…
Every year NASA holds a competition to chose the best photo of Earth. The Canary Islands won this year’s Tournament: Earth is again. (Last year’s winner was a photo of the submarine eruption off El Hierro.) The Canary Islands sit in the trade winds and the Canary current, both of which come from the north east. This photo, taken by NASA’s Terra satellite on June 15, 2013, shows long…
This year’s winning photo in NASA’s Tournament: Earth is the Canary Islands again. This time all seven of them. This photo was taken by NASA’s Terra satellite on June 15, 2013. The prevailing wind and current here comes from the north east. Downwind and downstream from each island, you can see a few wisps of cloud, and long shiny areas of sea. “According to sailors’ guides to the area, winds…
Most of the telescopes at the observatory here look spectacular even from the outside. SuperWASP looks like a big garden shed. It’s the white thing at bottom left. Even when it opens up, it still doesn’t look like a professional telescope. To me, it looks more like a small missile launcher. The equipment isn’t that spectacular either. As modern telescopes go, it was built for peanuts. It has eight cameras,…
cloud waterfall400 Jigsaw Puzzle Because the island sits in the trade winds, damp air hits the northeast of the island and has to rise, where it turns into clouds. Because La Palma has a north-south spine called the Cumbre Nueva, the cloud quite often reaches up to the ridge and then tumbles over as the cloud waterfall. This is extremely pretty, and best viewed from around the western side of…