Day 38: Orientation - check

In the morning I leave Quito and land on the Island of Baltra. You can find Baltra just north of Santa Cruz - a fairly big island in the middle. After landing we take a shuttle to the south of Baltra and then a boat over to Santa Cruz. From the north side of Santa Cruz we will drive all the way across the island to the south port city of Port Ayora. This is where the first week and the adventure starts. I'll keep you posted when I can get to the internet...

Just a bit of a backgroud on what is going on here... As you know the crust of the earth is made up of plates. You know of the Pacific Plate and the ring of fire, but what you might not know is that there are many other smaller plates moving around. One of those smaller plates is the Nazca plate and the chain of volcanic islands know as the Galapagos happens to have formed because this plate is moving over a "hot spot" which is spewing magma and building vocanic islands.

As you can see the Nazca plate is moving east and as it moves it is slamming into the South American plate which happens to be moving west. This collision is the reason for the giant Andes mountains. The Nazca plate happens to be one of the fastest moving plates as an average rate of 4 cm/year.

You can see that even though the plate is moving east, the "hot spot" is stationary and therefore the islands are forming in a "chain".

As the plate moves new islands form and because it's moving east the youngest islands happen to be further west. Because the eastern islands are no longer "growing" from the magma they erode and therefore are smaller.