Santa Cruz Island

The highlands of the broad Santa Cruz shield volcano rise to the N above the Charles Darwin Research Station at Academy Bay. The oval-shaped, 32 x 40-km-wide island is capped by youthful pit craters and cinder cones with well-preserved craters that largely bury a shallow summit caldera. Older uplifted submarine lava flows are found on the NE part of the island and at the fault-delimited offshore island of Baltra. The highland scoria cones are grouped along an E-W belt parallel to recent fault scarps that border Academy Bay. The youngest lava flows were erupted from vents along the summit fissure and on the N flank. Their fresh morphology and sparsely vegetated surfaces suggest they may be only a few thousand years old, although their ages are not known precisely.