Formed by the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana, the island of Tristan da Cunha in the archipelago of the same name is home to a small, extremely isolated farming community.
Tristan da Cunha Island and the Edinburgh of the Seven Seas community. Image: Dmitry Malov/Alamy
Tristan da Cunha is an archipelago in the South Atlantic Ocean, home to the world’s most isolated settlement. About 250 British Overseas Citizens live on the only settled island in the archipelago called Tristan da Cunha, in a community called Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, according to Live Science.
The Tristan da Cunha archipelago, or Tristan for short, consists of six volcanic islands located off St. Helena (another British territory in the Atlantic) 2,400 km southwest. Along with Ascension Island, Tristan and St. Helena constitutes a British overseas territory, extending over 3,250 km across the Atlantic Ocean, from a point west off the coast of Gabon to a point south of South Africa.
The main island is 12 km wide and the cone-shaped volcano named Queen Mary’s Peak here rises 2,062 m above sea level. The volcano’s central crater contains a heart-shaped lake that freezes in winter and melts in summer. The island is also a haven for wildlife with seals, seagulls and rockhopper penguins (Eudyptes moseleyi) breeding on the shore.
Tristan is only accessible by a six-day boat journey from South Africa. Most of the island’s residents are farmers, according to the BBC. The six islands in the Tristan archipelago are evidence of past geological activity deep in the Earth’s mantle, each forming from peaks in the ocean crust. They lie about 400 km east of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the North American and South American tectonic plates meet the Eurasian and African plates. Over time, they slowly move away, allowing boiling molten rock to flood into the gap in the middle. The islands of Tristan are not connected to a mountain ridge, but were created by magma erupting from deep within the Earth.
The archipelago grew over eons from a hotspot, a large hot column of material that rose from the mantle, the middle layer of the Earth, and formed volcanoes in the upper crust. The hot spot called Walvis Ridge Hotspot appeared between South America and Africa 132 million years ago, when the continents broke up after millions of years of merging in the ancient supercontinent Gondwana.
As the continents separated and the Earth’s crust began to push westward across the Walvis Ridge Hotspot, volcanoes gradually developed in a horizontal line beneath the Atlantic Ocean. They become islands and eventually cease to function as they drift away from the magma source. The main island of Tristan da Cunha is the second furthest island east of the archipelago, meaning it ceased operations not long after the four islands of Inaccessible, Nightingale, Middle and Stoltenhoff and before Gough Island.