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Thursday, April 20, 2006
Teide volcano, Tenerife, Canary Islands
The cropped detail shown left shows the inverted D shaped bowl that is the El Palmar valley. You can also clearly see the flat, Isla Baja region on the north coast, where you will find the town of Buenavista del Norte, with the "pimple" of the Montaña de Taco in it's center. On the west coast, are the marked "corrugated" ridges of the 500 meter plus, Los Gigantes cliffs.
The red spot (that I have added) is the highest point in this local area, the mountain Cruz de Gala (pictured right), which at 1,354 meters, as against Ben Nevis' (the highest peak in Britain photos) height of 1,344 m, makes them - as near as damn it - equal.
VolcanoWorld have various pages of information about Mount Teide, on Tenerife, featuring various satellite images and images taken from the Space Shuttle, photographs, as well as diagrams and simplified explanations of the geology of the island and its volcano. It's detailed enough, but is also fascinating and interesting enough, even for non-scientists.
Among the space images they use as reference is this SIR-C/X-SAR Image (pictured above) click here or on the image itself for a larger version including the whole island or, for more information and access to a full-resolution (22-megabyte) copy of this image, press here.
The image was acquired by the Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/X-SAR) onboard the space shuttle Endeavour on October 11, 1994. (SIR-C/X-SAR) is a joint U.S.-German-Italian project that uses a highly sophisticated imaging radar to capture images of Earth.
One of the things I did not know, is that the valleys of Orotava and Guimar formed as large pieces of the island were removed by landslides. The landslides are caused by the gravitational instability of the large island.
Teide (28.3N, 16.6W) is the third largest volcano on Earth. Like Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea (the first and second largest volcanoes), Teide is a shield volcano. Elevation at the summit of the volcano is 12,188.3 feet (3,715 m). The age of the main subaerial shield phase for Tenerife is about 5 million years. The Las Canadas depression formed by a combination of explosive emptying of a high-level magma chamber and collapse and lateral movement of the summit. The most recent eruption was on the northwest flank of the volcano in 1909.
Teide volcano, Tenerife, Canary Islands
Hi Pamela, thanks for your comment on Digital Gran. I am so pleased to find your website.
I will be visiting it often. I just love visiting Tenerife at least twice every year. We have stayed at the Los Gigantes Hotel for about 12 years now, but recently we have been staying in the Tenerife Princess and the Bitacora in Las Americas for a change. We like walking from one place to the other. When in los Gigantes, we walked to Playa Arena almost every day.