Abstract
We arrived at the last possible moment, witnesses to the death rattle of an island. The violent surf, biting and tearing at the island’s edges, had in the short span of less than a million years, reduced this once great volcano to a few pitiful columns jutting abruptly out of the water, and a broad field of tumbled rock debris, the whole being relentlessly ground into smaller and smaller fragments that slip slowly down the slopes into the abyss. Soon, in geologic terms, there will be nothing there to write home about, nothing but the stillness of deep water, of sediments churned occasionally by a burrowing crab, or perhaps the splash of a ship’s anchor.
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© 1996 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Schmieder, R.W. (1996). Overview: The Cordell Expeditions to Rocas Alijos. In: Schmieder, R.W. (eds) Rocas Alijos. Monographiae Biologicae, vol 75. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2917-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2917-8_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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