How Many Kilometers From Mozambique To Madagascar

[Saurabh Cloudas]

Slightlysmaller than the state of Texas, Madagascar is located approximately 250 miles (402 kilometers) east of Mozambique, a country along the southeast coast of Africa. Madagascar is surrounded by the Indian Ocean on all sides except for its western border, which lies along the Mozambique Channel. In addition to Mozambique, its closet neighbors are the Comoros Islands and the islands of Runion and Mauritius.

Madagascar has a youthful population, with over 60 percent of its residents under the age of 25. Music is an important part of Malagasy culture. Villages often hold parties in which locals can dance or play music with things like the valiha, a guitar-like instrument considered to be the national instrument of Madagascar.

The species thought to be most representative of the island (other than lemurs) is the baobab tree, the national tree of Madagascar. The thick, straight trunk of the tree swells into the shape of a bottle as it collects rainwater.

Humans have lived in Madagascar only for about 1,300 years. The first settlers on the island are believed to have arrived from Indonesia in Southeast Asia. For centuries, many small kingdoms ruled different areas of the island.

Europa Island spans about 28 square kilometers, making it the largest of the les parses. It was initially an atoll that became exposed at the sea surface around 90,000 years ago. The atoll progressively filled in, and it slowly transformed into the island we know today.

Vegetation across much of the island likely has not changed much since naturalists started visiting in the early 20th century. Dry forests still grow along the oldest and highest parts of the island, where the ground is rocky. Herbaceous plants and grasses spring from the newer surfaces that rise just a few centimeters above sea level, and bushes prefer the coastal areas. The native vegetation provides critical breeding habitat for seabirds, including the red-tailed tropicbird, the red-footed booby, and the great and lesser frigatebird.

The most obvious evidence of human activity in these images are an airstrip, built in 1973 when a military camp was established, and the nearby sisal plantation planted by a family that attempted to settle on the island in the early 1900s. Several attempts to settle on the island since 1860 have failed, possibly because of the lack of fresh water. Today the only human presence is the French military and the occasional visiting scientist.

The ghostly white shapes northeast and immediately southwest of Wrangel Island are sea ice. Over the course of the satellite record, Arctic sea ice has advanced and retreated past Wrangel Island many times. From 1979 to 2000, the sea ice edge at the end of summer generally fell somewhere in the vicinity of Wrangel Island, but this is not the first summer when the sea ice edge has retreated well north of the island.

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