Floreana Island (also known as Charles Island or Santa María Island) is a broad shield volcano whose surface is densely covered with cinder cones. The most conspicuous of these is Cerro de Pajas, seen here from the north with a spatter cone in the right foreground. A massive pahoehoe lava flow from Cerro de Pajas, perhaps the youngest on Floreana, reached the SW coast over a broad 6.5 km area. The youngest lava flow on Floreana, once thought to be Holocene, has a late Pleistocene surface exposure age.

Photo by Ed Vicenzi, 2002 (Smithsonian Institution).

This image is made available under the Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license terms.

Floreana