Ascension Island

I posted once before, in September, about the deliberate terraforming of Ascension Island, and I still think it's fascinating. Here's another article, in the Economist, about the history of this island.

Discovered by the Portuguese in 1501, it was so "barren and isolated" that no country even bothered to claim it.

Just to the west of the mid-ocean ridge that separates South America’s tectonic plate from Africa’s, it is the top of a volcano which rises steeply from abyssal plains more than four kilometres below the surface of the ocean. The volcano made it above that surface only a million or so years ago, since when the island has grown to about 100 square kilometres. Before people arrived it was home to just a flightless bird, a land crab and no more than 30 species of plant, none as big as a bush.

Weirdly, when the British took possession of the island in 1815, they kept it on the books as a ship, the HMS Ascension. It was just a staging post, with even fresh water having to be shipped in.

That earlier article at the BBC kept mostly to the attempt, starting in 1847, to build an artificial ecosystem on the island, "the world's first experiment in terraforming." This one discusses that, but has more about the history of the island and also about the present situation. I still think it's fascinating.

It's optimistic, too:

The lesson that Easter Island teaches humanity is bleak. Ascension Island’s story has a more hopeful message. It shows that environments not remotely natural in their origins can become lovely to inhabit. People like Mr Stroud can and will act not just to preserve the environment but to improve it, making it more, not less, than it otherwise would be.

Winding down the flank of the mountain, there is a graceful fluttering in the woods off to the side of the road. Free from the threat of cats, fairy terns have returned to the island—and forsaken their ancestral cliffs for a new life among the leaves and branches. They flash bright white and beautiful against the green.

Since I'm a huge science fiction fan, the implications of this experiment in regards to terraforming other planets also interests me. And heck, at the rate we're going, we may well need to terraform our own planet in the years ahead. The unintentional changes we're making are almost uniformly disastrous. Sooner or later, we're going to have to repair the damage.