The Mars of the Mid-Atlantic

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2016

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ascension Island is a tiny scrap of British territory, marooned in the tropical mid-Atlantic roughly halfway between Brazil and Africa. It is the tip of a giant undersea volcano – rugged, remote and, up until around 150 years ago, almost completely devoid of vegetation.

Peter Gibbs visits to learn how 19th Century botanist Joseph Hooker, encouraged by Charles Darwin, planted a forest on the island’s summit to trap moisture brought by the trade winds, introducing a panoply of flora from around the world - ginger, guava, bamboo, ficus and dozens more.

But is Ascension’s cloud forest all it appears? He talks to conservationists struggling to cope with invasive species running riot, hears about the rescue of Ascension’s tiny endemic ferns, encounters nesting turtles on the beaches and ventures among the chattering ‘wideawakes’ on the sweltering lava plains by the coast.

(Photo: Ascension Island. Credit: Matthew Teller)

Transcript

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0:00.0	This place is full of surprises.
0:05.0	Crabs down on the foreshore that scamper about like mice and they skitter off across the water at a great rate of
0:14.7	not.
0:16.7	Oh, well I've just struggled up the last few meters to reach a mount of top setting that's like something out of a fairy tale, a tranquil green pool surrounded by bamboo up to 15 meters tall.
0:31.3	I've been pushing through plantations of ginger.
0:35.0	And this is the setting for a unique 150 year experiment.
0:42.0	We're almost 3,000 feet above sea level, yet it's 25
0:46.6	degrees and humid.
0:50.6	I'm Peter Gibbs for Discovery on the BBC World Service, I'm on one of the most
0:56.2	scientifically fascinating islands on Earth, a place that dazzled and inspired the young Charles Darwin.
1:06.0	Imagine smooth conical hills of a red color,
1:10.0	rising distinct out of a level surface of rugged lava.
1:14.0	To complete this desolate scene,
1:17.0	the black rocks on the coast are lashed by a wild and turbulent sea.
1:21.0	Near the coast nothing grows. On the elevated
1:25.0	parts, some grass is scattered over the surface. The flanks of the
1:28.5	central emolence, green mountain are covered by a great mass of loose
1:31.7	fragments. The island is entirely destitute of trees.
1:36.2	The people of St Helene say, we know we live on a rock, but the poor people of ascension live on a cinder.
1:54.4	In geological terms it's still an infant. It only emerged from the waters of the Atlantic
1:59.0	around about a million years ago and I'm still surrounded here on the coast by masses of
2:04.1	contorted black lava there's red cinder cones off in the distance. Even the
	...

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