Time To Read
Date Last Modified
The Ocean in Seven Places · Place 03
The Galápagos
There are penguins on the equator, and every few years the water goes warm and half of them die. The islands under them are moving, too.
Seven short chapters · about 15 minutes each · a practice set at the end of every chapter
Start here
What you are walking into
Seven short chapters. Each one has a video, a few photos, something live to play with, and a quick activity. There is very little reading. The first five chase one strange fact: penguins living right on the equator, about 900 km off the coast of Ecuador. The answer is a pair of cold currents, one arriving from the south and one hidden underneath the sea, and when they fail, the whole world’s weather notices.
The last two are about the islands themselves: a line of volcanoes riding a moving plate like boxes on a conveyor belt, and the animals that got stranded on them and turned into something new. Lizards that swim. Cormorants that walked away from flying. By the end you will be able to explain El Niño better than most people who say the words on the news. You will also have learned more college oceanography. We are still not making a big deal of that.
Before you start
Watch this first
National Geographic — The Galapagos Islands Are a Pristine Paradise. Under two minutes. No notes, no questions. Just meet the place.
And then this: the islands from above
BBC Earth Relax — The Galapagos From Above. The islands from the air: craters, lava fields and a lot of empty ocean. Leave it running in the background while you do something else; it will not mind.
The seven chapters
Your route through the islands
Chapter 1
Penguins on the Equator
A penguin on the equator is not lost. The cold water came to it, all the way from near Antarctica.
Chapter 2
The River Under the Sea
A hundred meters down, a hidden river flows the opposite way to the sea above it, and it runs straight into the Galápagos.
Chapter 3
Layers of the Sea
Cold water and warm water barely mix. That one fact decides who eats and who starves.
Chapter 4
When the Water Goes Warm
Every few years the trade winds get tired, the warm water sloshes east, and the penguins’ food disappears.
Chapter 5
The Whole World Feels It
When the Pacific gets a fever, Peru loses its anchovies and California gets soaked. One ocean, one planet.
Chapter 6
Islands on a Conveyor Belt
The islands are a conveyor belt: new volcanoes are born in the west, and old ones ride east and drown.
Chapter 7
Built for a Strange Place
Lizards that dive for seaweed and shrink when food runs short. Darwin called them “most disgusting, clumsy lizards.”
Photos: Karen Longwell, limoo, Linda Heyworth, Lloyd Douglas, Zelch Csaba / Pexels
Play with it
Find the cold stripe on the equator
This live map colors the sea surface by temperature, with the currents drawn on top. The Galápagos sit right on the equator, a little west of Ecuador. Click the water around them, then click the sea at the same latitude out in the middle of the Pacific, and compare. Most years you will see a cool stripe running west along the equator; if it has vanished, the Pacific may be having an El Niño, and Chapter 4 is suddenly the news.
Live map: earth.nullschool.net by Cameron Beccario, using NOAA and other public data.
How to use these pages
Watch it, read it, try it
Every chapter has the same rhythm: a video, three short cards, something live to explore, and a couple of hands-on activities. The last activity on each page is an eight-question practice set that covers the whole chapter. Do every one, retry anything you miss, and read the feedback. The wrap-up page ends with a twenty-question review of the whole archipelago.
Warm-up
What do you already know?
Six true-or-false guesses before you start. Getting some wrong right now is the point: each answer tells you which chapter explains it.
Ready?
Chapter 1 is fifteen minutes and mostly pictures
Photo credits (Pexels): Diego F. Parra, Lloyd Douglas, Karen Longwell, limoo, Linda Heyworth, Zelch Csaba.