Monday 25 February 2019

I Have Often Heard Of New Islands,

being made by volcanoes,


or volcanic islands being made bigger by volcanic action, I well remember the eruption and subsequent evacuate of the island of Tristan da Cunha, when the volcanic island grew bigger, I was 11 years old at the time so that made it 1961, at school we talked of nothing else, as did the teachers for a number of days, but that is just one of many that nature has made, also man made islands or reclaimed seabed are not uncommon options to increase land mass,

but a man made island of seashells? I had never heard of that, until now, photograph by mpwhidby, it appears that conch meat is so popular that a mountain of conch shells discarded by fishermen in the same place over thousands of years has resulted in an island of them, the island is located just east of Anegada, the second largest of the British Virgin Islands, in the Caribbean, 

scientists extracted some shells from the bottom of Conch Island and, using radiocarbon dating, they were able to determine that they dated back thousands of years, all the way to AD 1245 ± 80, “These conch burial grounds support the fact that the indigenous Arawak people lived on Anegada thousands of years ago,” experts say, modern day conch fishermen have been contributing heavily to the rise of Conch Island over the past 200 years, but while that has made it that much more attractive of a tourist attraction, it has also put the snails on the endangered species list, they’ve been so overhavested that their very existence is threatened all over the Caribbean, Conch Island isn’t exactly the largest man-made island in the world, but it’s large enough to be visible on Google Earth, but wait a second before you rush off for a selfie, “These shells aren’t as pretty as you probably think they are,” Reddit user Viking Mart explained on the popular social network. “Most of of them are defaced. This is because in order to get the conch meat out, fishermen usually make a hole by the ‘nose’ of the shell. This is to reach and loosen the snail muscle (with a screwdriver or knife), and then pull it out. This leaves these conch shells defaced and one would probably have a hard time selling them.”


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