De Havilland Canada Twin Otter |
Cool picture of a cool airplane on the beach in The Maldives. We've been there before. The flight log shows it operating out of Male Int'l, so let's take a look:
Two populated islands in the Malé Atoll Male / Velana International Airport |
Okay, there's the jetport, but where do the seaplanes dock?
Maldives Seaplane Docks |
Maldives Seaplane Terminal |
The Maldives & Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean |
For Patrick O'Brian fans, Mauritius and Reunion are in the lower left corner.
Atolls of The Maldives
Roughly 500 miles top to bottom |
Note that an Atoll is not the same as an island. The two islands shown above are part of the Kaafu administrative area / Malé Atoll:
Malé Atoll
The placemark is on the airport |
A Malaysian airliner got shot down in the Ukraine this morning, which reminds us that there is a new conspiracy theory circulating that the Malaysian airliner that disappeared a couple months ago was diverted to Diego Garcia by the CIA. Irba tells us that Diego Garcia is basically a ring of skinny islands around a big lagoon, and the lagoon is fresh water. That seems improbable, so I do a little checking.
Diego Garcia gets a hundred inches of rain a year, which is a boat load. Oregon, the rainiest place in the USA onlty gets about thirty some inches. Diego Garcia is a coral atoll, and as such is very porous so rain water soaks right in. Since it is going into this porous rock, there isn't a lot of mixing going on, so it basically collects on top of the salt water that has soaked in from the ocean. This fresh water can be extracted via shallow wells and as long as you don't take too much out of any one spot you can get all the water you need. I mean a hundred inches of rain a year is a stink load of rain.
a hundred inches? Dude,,96" is eight feet. Look from floor to ceiling.. Good grief.. That would wear on a fella.
ReplyDeleteOh, come on, it ain't that bad, it's only two inches a week.
ReplyDelete