Darwin’s Ecological Experiments on Ascension Island

September 3rd, 2010

Oddly enough I was just reading about this last week when I ran a crossed a discussion on terraforming on some other website. The short of it is that terraforming is the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying its atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology to be similar to those of Earth to make it habitable by terran organisms. It mentioned situations such as Mars, but of course it also had to mention the actual experiments of Darwin and Hooker on Ascension Island. A place you won’t get to with a tank of gas and an rv insurance quote.

BBC News ran an article about just this thing a couple days ago and it immediately caught my eye due to just hearing about it for the first time no more than a few days before. They also mention this experiment as something that may be pertinent to a future on Mars.