Galápagos Geography: Like it or not, it is essential that you have the basic features of Galápagos geography in your head. Here's a map of the islands and a list of names and features that you need to be able to locate a/o identify on a map.

Islands: Learn all of the major islands. Today, people typically refer to them by their Spanish names, but in some cases, you need to know the English names as well. We've indicated where you need to learn these. The names in boldface are the ones we'll routinely use:

• Baltra
• Bartolomé
• Daphne (major and minor)
• Española (Hood)
• Fernandina (Narborough)
• Genovesa (Tower)
• Isabela (Albemarle)
• Marchena (Bindloe)
• Pinta (Abingdon)
• Pinzon (Duncan)
• Rábida (Jervis)
• San Cristóbal (Chatham)
• Santa Cruz (Indefatigable)
• Santa Fé (Barrington)
• Santa Maria (as often as not "Floreana" in Spanish, "Charles" in English)
• Santiago (James)
• North and South Plaza

Isabela volcanoes:

• Volcán Ecuador
• Volcán Wolf
• Volcán Darwin
• Volcán Alcedo
• Sierra Negra
• Cerro Azul

Towns:

• Puerto Baquerizo Moreno
• Puerto Ayora
• Puerto Villamil

Submarine features:

• Carnegie Ridge
• Cocos Ridge
• Galápagos Platform
• Galápagos Rift

Trust us. Soon, all of these names will be meaningful.

Now for Geology. Althought the Galápagos haven't been the catalyst for any revolution in Geology as they were for Biology, they nevertheless nicely illustrate the 20th century revolution of Plate Tectonics. But first, some basics:

Rocks:

What is a rock? A purely descriptive definition is that a rock is - A naturally occurring aggregate of minerals and other solid material. - Usually, there are several minerals in the aggregate, though some rocks may have only one. The other materials may include natural glasses, organic material, or fossils.

Geologists usually think of rocks in a second important way, however. Please memorize this and recite it like a mantra:

* A rock is a record of the environment in which it formed. *

Rock types:

In Lyell's day, people recognized that rocks fell into broad catagories.

• Igneous: Rocks that form from the cooling and solidification of magma. Igneous rocks are generally have interlocking crystals that show no preferred orientation. There are two types:

  • Intrusive: Igneous rocks that formed underground from slowly cooling magma. These have large visible crystals. E.g.: Granite.

  • Extrusive (also "volcanic"): Igneous rocks that formed near the surface from rapidly cooling magma. These have small, sometimes even microscopic, crystals. E.g.: Basalt. Most of what we see will be of this type.

• Metamorphic: Rocks that form from the recrystallization of preexisting rocks under extreme heat and/or pressure. E.g.: Basalt.Phyllite

• Sedimentary: Rocks that form from transported fragments of preexisting rocks. E.g.: tufa, Limestone, and Sandstone.

• Igneous - solidified from molten material

• Metamorphic - recrystallized by heat and/or pressure.

• Sedimentary - composed of remains of preexisting rocks.

The material that makes up any rock might have a complex history.

• The grains of quartz sand in a sandstone might have been wethered from a quartz vein in a metamorphic rock that prior to being metamorphosed, had been an igneous granite.

• That same sandstone may, in the future, become buried deep in the crust, undergo metamorphism, melt, and resolidify as an igneous rock.

Geologists describe this range of possible histories as the Rock Cycle. As the schematic shows, it actually encompasses many possible cycles.

In Darwin and Lyell's time, people expected that the topography and composition of the ocean's floor should resemble that on land. The first practical test of that hypothesis occurred in 1872 when the British government sponsored the first interdisciplinary research expidition to expore the world's oceans - the four-year voyage of the H. M. S. Challenger. The deep oceans defied expecataions:

• The ocean basins were mostly flat. Such hills as existed were isolated cones, i.e. volcanoes.

• Sediments, when present, were very thin.

• All of the bedrock was volcanic - igneous, even when there were no nearby volcanoes.

• Because of this, the bulk density of ocean floor crust was distinctly greater than that of continental crust. Geologists soon recognized two distinct types of crust:
  • Oceanic: Richer in Mg and Fe and heavier/
  • Continental: Richer in Al and Si and lighter.

• The rocks were very young compared to those on continents. None older than the Cretaceous (i.e. <=145 million years, whereas continental rocks can range up to 3.8 billion.)

• Bizzare mid-oceanic ridges ran down the middle of oceans. These were soon recognized to be the longest mountain ranges in the world. They are typically highly symmetrical around a ridge axis and at their crests are long rift valleys.

• Deep trenches fringe the margins of most oceans. These are parallelled by chains of active volcanoes.

The beginnings of an answer came from an improbably source. The German meteorologist Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) performed field work in Greenland, covered by a continental ice sheet. There, he had ample opportunity to observe the behavior of glaciers. He observed that ice, when greatly compressed, flowed plasticly, allowing the ice sheet to glide slowly across the underlying rock, and apparently began wondering if rock did the same thing on a larger scale. He noticed the following patterns:

• Shorelines of continents separated by oceans tend to match up geometrically.

• Mountain belts are linear and tend to occur on one side of continents.

• Continents separated by oceans tended to have matching types of metamorphic and sedimentary rocks.

• Continents separated by oceans tended to have matching types of fossil plants and animals.

• Continents separated by oceans tended to have matching records of continental glaciers.

• The matches in shorelines, geology, and paleontology between continents occurred because these continents had once been joined in an hourglass-haped supercontinent called Pangaea. Wegener particularly noted the similarities in India, Africa, and South America, and correctly predicted the discovery of similar rocks in Antarctica.

• Linear mountain ranges were formed by the "bow shock" of a continent plowing across the earth.

From 1929 until 1960, no US textbook mentioned continental drift. In 1930 Wegener died in a freak storm while doing field work in Greenland.

New evidence and reconsideration

Paleomagnetism After WWII, several lines of evidence from the study of the intrinsic magnetic fields of igneous rocks began to come together.

• Paleomagnetism on land: Igneous rocks, when they solidify, preserve a record of their magnetic environment at that time. Since the magnetic poles wander, geologists thought that a neat way to track the ancient movement of the poles would be to read the record preserved in igneous rocks' intrinsic magnetic fields. Immediately two enigmas developed.

  • Diffrent continents tell contradictory histories. If you assumed that the continents were stationary, then the rocks of different continents told radically different stories. A creeping suspicion developed that Wegener's hypothesis described these observations as well as anyone's. As of 1960, academic opinion was split 50-50.

  • Reversals: It appeared that irregular intervals, North and South magnetic poles literally switched places.

• Paleomagnetism at sea: Recall that geomagnetic reversals occur at irregular intervals, causing North and South magnetic poles literally switched places. During WWII, marine magnetometers had been invented to detect submarines. In the early 1960s, geologists sought magnetic information from marine rocks, using these. What they found was spectacular.
  • Bands of rocks whose intrinsic magnetic fields had normal magnetic polarity alternated with parallel bands showing reversed polarity. These bands paralleled the mid-ocean ridges. Thus, bands of rock with the same polarity must be of roughly of equal age.
  • Furthermore, these bands formed pairs of mirror image counterparts on the opposite side of the ridge. It appeared that sea floor was forming and at the ridge crests and moving apart, as if they were being spooled out.
  • To further clinch the argument, by the 1980s, sensative measurements had been made, actually measuring the rate of sea floor spreading. This is roughly 3 cm/year for the Atlantic. If you project this backwards you get the ocean opening at the time of its oldest sediments.

Layers of the upper Earth:

• Lithosphere: The zone in which rocks are rigid and deform brittlely. Includes the crust and upper mantle. The lithosphere is broken into distinct rigid plates.

• Asthenosphere: A region of the upper mantle beneath the lithosphere in which rock is partially molten and deforms very ductilely. Plate movement occurs when lithospheric plates glide over the ductile asthenosphere.

• Below this the mantle rock deforms ductilely but contains less liquid and is therefore more stiff than in the asthenosphere.

• New oceanic crust is formed by frequent volcanic eruptions along the lenght of mid-ocean ridges and is pushed outward from them gradually.

• Old oceanic crust is destroyed when it subducts or dives beneath adjacent plates at subduction zones. Oceanic trences are the topographic expression of these subduction zones.

• Oceanic crust behaves differently from continental crust, being denser. Whereas sea floor gets subducted, continental rock is light enough not to, although it can be profoundly deformed, when two continents (i.e. blobs of continental crust) collide above a subduction zone.

• Mid-ocean ridges and subduction zones largely divide the oceanic crust and uppermost mantle into rigid plates that glide across a deeper layer of ductile and partially melted rock and move relative to one another.
• There are several major plates and numerous minor ones. You should know the names and locations of the plates in and near the eastern Pacific:
  • North American
  • South American
  • Pacific
  • Cocos
  • Nazca

  Thickness: The thickness of the lithosphere varies depending on:

  • whether it carries oceanic or continental crust: Continental lithosphere is, on average, 150 km thick, although it can be thicker beneath mountain ranges.
  • how far from a mid-oceanic ridge it is. Old oceanic lithosphere is up to 100 km thick, while at the axis of a mid-oceanic ridge, it may be only ten km thick.

• Plate tectonics was only a partial vindication of Wegener's continental drift. It was different in that the continents are merely passengers riding on mobile plates, and do not drift across the earth's crust by themselves.

• Distribution of earthquakes and volcanoes along plate margins.

• Locations of orogenies - mountain building events. There are two types:
  • Peripheral, result of the leading edge of continent interacting with a subducting oceanic plate. E.g. Cascades or Andes.
  • Interior, result of collisions of and coalescence of continents. E.g. Himalayas. The Appalachians, Atlas, Urals, and others represent ancient interior orogenies.

• Apparant motion of hot spots: There are places where volcanoes erupt not in a plate tectonics determined arc, but at a single point. Examples are
  • In the middle of an oceanic plate: Hawaii,
  • In the middle of an continental plate: The Yellowstone Basin.
  These are called hot spots. The sources of their heat are rising plumes of hot mantle rock that originate far below the domain of plate tectonics - maybe even from the mantle-core interface. Thus, they are rooted deep in the Earth. Nevertheless, they often sit at the end of lone strings of extinct volcanoes. Hawaii contains the youngest volcanoes in the Emperor Seamount chain. These chains form as a plate moves over the hot spot, continually carrying away the older volcanoes and allowing new ones to form. Similar to the effect of allowing an old vinal LP to rotate over a bunsen burner flame.

• Occasionally a mid-oceanic ridge and a hot spot directly coincide. In this case, you get a great surge of volcanic activity from both sources, as in Iceland.

The Galápagos plate setting: The Galápagos, like Hawaii, are primarily oceanic hot spot volcanoes. We see a pattern similar to that of Hawaii as a result:

• Today, the mantle plume that feeds them is centered beneath Isabela and Fernandina, so these westerns islands are the youngest and most volcanically active.
• The general motion of the Nazca plate is toward the East, so the oldest islands and the only ones that are volcanically extince are at teh eastern end: San Cristóbal , Española, and Santa Fé .
• Beyond that, the Carnegie Ridge extends to the mainland.

In some ways, however, the Galápagos are distinct. The big headache comes from the proximity of the Galápagos Rift 50 km. north of the the islands. The rift and the plume are separate and distinct sources of magma, but they are close enough to one another that they interact.

• The chemistry of the magma erupted from the various volcanoes is different, revealing that some volcanoes (mostly the ones in the south and west) are fed by the plume, and some (mostly in the northeast) are fed by the rift.
• The proximity of the rift to the plume plume seems to have "spread out" the zone of the plume's activity, so, whereas Hawaii has only three active volcanoes, the Galápagos have at least fourteen.
• The proximity of the plume to the prift seems to have "overstimulated" it, causing it to produce the northern chain of islands, which are off the track of the plume, iteslf, and are geochemically similar to ridge basalts.
• The real biggie: The Galápagos rift has been moving northeast with respect to the plume. Thus, about five million years ago, the plume was directly under the rift. Before that, the hot spot erupted through the Cocos Plate. This is seen from the presence of the Cocos ridge, which extends to the northeast.
• As a result of this, if we want to look for very old rocks that might have erupted from the Galápagos hot spot, we would look to the northeast. Indeed, some rocks as old as 90 million years have been found in the Caribbean and in Northwestern South America, that are geochemically similar to Galápagos basalts.

The age of the islands

Knowing that the Galápagos are hot spot volcanoes allows us to unravel some enigmas. The oldest island, Española, is about 5 million years old. DNA analyses of some Galápagos critters, however, suggests that their ancestors must have been on the island at least 8 million years ago. It is now plain that although these particular islands have not been there for eight million years, islands have been present above the Galápagos hot spot for at least that long. Indeed, on the Carnegie Ridge, there is an 8 million year old seamount (underwater volcano) with rounded boulders at its summit. These were formed when rock was eroded in the surf.