A volcano slides into the sea causing an 800 foot wave to crash onto into an adjacent island. As that wave crashes onto land it picks up 700-ton boulders and throws them uphill leaving them stranded far above their source. It sounds like a plot from a Hollywood movie but this is real. It happened in the Cape Verde Islands off of the west coast of Africa long ago.
Long Distance Dispersal via Catastrophic Events
When I give my lecture in class about animal distributions, questions often are raised about how did animals get to some remote islands or even islands that are not that far off from the mainland. Sometimes the answer is that during ice ages the oceans was up to hundreds of meters lower than it is... Continue Reading →