earthstory: Crescent Astronaut Anton Shkaplerov captured this shot of Tortuga Island in the Galapago
earthstory: Crescent Astronaut Anton Shkaplerov captured this shot of Tortuga Island in the Galapagos from the International Space Station earlier this month. The name “Tortuga” is given to a number of islands and features such as bays around the world – it translates to “Turtle” and is given to this island because of the tortoises that lived on it. The island is obviously an old, eroding volcanic crater. It is considered a “Tuff ring”, made mostly of palagonite, an altered igneous rock formed when molten rock interacts with water and explodes. Molten rock rose up in the center of this feature, interacted with seawater, and triggered explosions that threw material outwards, forming the tuff ring. Keep reading -- source link