Qualla: Cocos Island

Cocos Island: Introduction

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Barry Peters, CC BY 2.0. Cocos Island is the only thing sticking out of the sea on its own tectonic plate. That is not a metaphor. The Cocos Plate is one of Earth's minor crustal slabs, and this twenty-four-square-kilometer wedge of basalt and forest is the single piece of it above water. Everything else is ocean floor. Add that to the rest of what Cocos is - a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a hammerhead shark mecca, a pirate-treasure legend, the inspiration behind half a shelf of adventure fiction - and you start to understand why Jacques Cousteau visited it several times and called it, in 1994, the most beautiful island in the world.

Read more: Cocos Island on Qualla

Image: Barry Peters | CC BY 2.0

Cocos Island: A Volcano in the Middle of Nowhere

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Axxis10, CC BY-SA 3.0. The oldest rocks here are between 1.91 and 2.44 million years old, dated by potassium-argon methods and overwhelmingly basaltic - the signature of a shield volcano built slowly by cooling lava. Cocos sits atop the aseismic Cocos Ridge, with a caldera and a trachytic lava dome ins...

Read more: Cocos Island on Qualla

Image: Axxis10 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cocos Island: Rain, Cloud, and a Forest That Arrived by Accident

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Виктор В, CC BY-SA 2.0. Cocos has a tropical rainforest climate with more than 7,000 millimeters of rainfall a year, comparable to the rainiest corners of Colombia's Chocó. Constant cloudiness and convergent ocean currents keep the island wet essentially year-round. Because Cocos was never connected to ...

Read more: Cocos Island on Qualla

Image: Виктор В | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cocos Island: The Ocean Around It

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geo Swan (talk), Public domain. The marine ecosystem is why the island is protected. Surrounding reefs and volcanic tunnels hold more than thirty species of coral, sixty species of crustaceans, six hundred species of mollusks, and over three hundred species of fish - including yellowfin tuna, giant mantas, sail...

Read more: Cocos Island on Qualla

Image: Geo Swan (talk) | Public domain

Cocos Island: The Treasure and the Fiction

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Adam Kess, CC BY-SA 3.0. Cocos has featured in pirate lore for nearly two centuries. The first treasure claim came from a woman named Mary Welch, who said 350 tons of gold raided from Spanish galleons lay buried here by Captain Bennett Graham in 1818. The Portuguese pirate Benito Bonito supposedly hid an...

Read more: Cocos Island on Qualla

Image: David Adam Kess | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cocos Island: A Painful Administrative Past

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Shannon Rankin, NOAA, Public domain. The island's human history is thin but not empty. Cocos was annexed by Costa Rica in 1832, and whalers stopped here regularly until kerosene displaced whale oil in the mid-1800s. In October 1863, one of the darkest episodes in its history: the ship Adelante marooned 426 Tongan pe...

Read more: Cocos Island on Qualla

Image: Shannon Rankin, NOAA | Public domain