Stop Three, Divergent!

This whole traveling-the-world thing is a lot more tiring than you might think. After I left Nepal I got on an extremely long plane ride to Brazil, where I had just enough time to grab some delicious airport food before getting on another plane out to the tiny island of Ascensión in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Ascensión is barely 34 square miles, and is extremely remote. I even had to apply to visit! The reason I'm here is because it is one of the closest locations to a major divergent boundary, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Divergent boundaries are caused by two plates moving away from each other, oftentimes on the ocean floor. These boundaries have rift valleys, which are valleys at the center of a mid-ocean ridge. The ridges are caused because the plates are moving away from each other, allowing molten rock to force its way up and then cool into new oceanic crust. Below you can see a diagram of this. There are quite a lot of earthquakes associated with divergent boundaries. Here on Ascensión there was a 5.3 magnitude earthquake in early January, and there can be over a dozen earthquakes annually. The ridge is technically made up of dozens of volcanoes, but they are all underwater. However, Ascensión is in fact a volcanic island, meaning it is actually like the top of a giant underwater mountain!

http://gomyclass.com/geology10/files/lecshare1/html/images/objectsobj50-1.jpg

http://www.ascension-island.gov.ac/gallery/

I'm going to miss it here.