Tinos, the third-largest island in the Cyclades off Greece, was known in antiquity as “the island of the winds.” There is a reason: The famous Meltemi, often fierce northern winds, blow through the islands in the summer. The winds also protect the island from overtourism.
Tinos has more than 60 villages, most folded into sheltered Aegean-facing cliff sides or valleys. The water ringing its beaches is turquoise, and the sunsets are blood orange. The home of a miracle-working church and countless sanctuaries, Tinos is, for Greeks, a renowned pilgrimage destination.
Source: New York Times
Staffa is an island of the Inner Hebrides in Argyll and Bute, Scotland. The Vikings gave it this name as its columnar basalt reminded them of their houses, which were built from vertically placed tree-logs.
Staffa lies about 10 kilometres (6 miles) west of the Isle of Mull; its area is 33 hectares (82 acres)[7] and the highest point is 42 metres (138 feet) above sea level. The island is entirely of volcanic origin. It consists of a basement of tuff, underneath colonnades of a black fine-grained Tertiary basalt, overlying which is a third layer of basaltic lava without a crystalline structure. By contrast, slow cooling of the second layer of basalt resulted in an extraordinary pattern of predominantly hexagonal columns which form the faces and walls of the principal caves. The lava contracted towards each of a series of equally spaced centres as it cooled and solidified into prismatic columns, a process known as columnar jointing. The columns typically have three to eight sides, six being most common. The columns are also divided horizontally by cross joints. These columnar jointed sections represent the tops and bottoms of individual lava flows. Between these sections lie regions of much more chaotic jointing, known as the entablature. The origin of the entablature is unknown, but could be due to flooding of the lava flow, causing much more rapid cooling, or the interaction of stress fields from the two regions of columnar jointing as they approach one another.
Source: Wikipedia
Islands
Hy-Brasil was noted on maps as early as 1325 when Genoese cartographer Dalorto placed the island west of Ireland. On successive sailing charts, it appears southwest of Galway Bay.
Both Saint Barrind and Saint Brendan found the island on their respective voyages, and returned home with nearly identical descriptions of Hy-Brasil, which they dubbed the “Promised Land.”
A Catalan map of about 1480 labels an island as “Illa de brasil” to the south-west of Ireland, where the mythical place was supposed to be.
Expeditions left Bristol in 1480 and 1481 to search for it, and a letter written shortly after the return of John Cabot from his expedition in 1497 reports that land found by Cabot had been “discovered in the past by the men from Bristol who found Hy Brasil.”
Source: irishcentral.com
Floating cities, flying cities …
Thanks to climate change, sea levels are lapping up against coastal cities and communities. In an ideal world, efforts would have already been made to slow or stop the impact. The reality is that humanity living within 60 miles of a coast will eventually need to move or adapt.
Is one option is to move onto a floating city?
This image is a contribution to #farfara2031 by @timesuplinz for a workshop, held in 2022.