Urbina Bay & Punta Moreno
There are times when an unexpected happening connects us deeply to this planet and its creatures. It occurred to me today, while walking into the vegetation of Urbina Bay. I was hoping for a picture for the current Daily Expedition Report when I tumbled upon a land tortoise. A cloud projected its shadows on the creature, and I felt close to it, and to its, and my, world.
This tortoise could have been here when Urbina was uplifted, in 1954, when the island abruptly changed its shape and size. Within hours, or what might have been minutes, more than six kilometers of coastline came four meters above sea level. Walking along we find the evidence: invertebrate skeletons, huge heads of brain coral, shells, exoskeletons of lobsters and crabs. An intrusion of magma produced this huge uplifting, an impressive phenomena in a human time scale, but a tiny event when we remember that we inhabit a 4.5-million year-old dynamic planet.
And life has to adapt to this ever changing Earth, and we, human beings, have to adapt as well.
