Green Mountain

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Green Mountain, Ascension Island
View of Ascension Island from the west, showing Green Mountain in the distance.
Elevation	2,817 ft (859 m)
Location	Ascension Island, South Atlantic Ocean
Prominence	2,817 ft (859 m)
Coordinates	7°57′S, 14°22′W
Type	Stratovolcano
Age of rock	Holocene
Last eruption	Unknown
Easiest route	road, then hike

Map of Ascension Island.

For the Vermont mountain range, see Green Mountains.

Green Mountain is a common name for "The Peak" on Ascension Island which has gained some fame for being one of very few large-scale artificial forests.

Many early 19th century accounts, including Charles Darwin's (July 1836), described the volcanic island as barren with very few plants, some of them endemic to the island, not to be found anywhere else. A recent census (Ashmole 2000) assesses the island's native vascular plants at 25 to 30 species, about 10 of them endemic to Ascension. This impoverished flora was a consequence of the island being only 1 million years old as well as over 1,000 miles from any major landmass. Then, in 1843, the British plant collector Joseph Dalton Hooker saw the island with Sir James Clark Ross's Antarctica expedition. He assumed that the lack of vegetation on the island was caused by some ecological disaster—indeed the last major eruption on Ascension had happened less than 500 years previously— and Hooker started a project to "rebuild" the island with lush plants and animals. He was able to receive much attention worldwide.

From that time until the 1880s many organizations and even navy officials traveled to the island to plant seedlings of a variety of species. An 1865 Admiralty report stated on the subject of Green Mountain, "(the island) now possesses thickets of 40 kinds of trees, besides numerous shrubs; through the spreading of vegetation, the water supply is now excellent." By the early 1900s many crops such as bananas and guavas were growing naturally.

The result is a man-made tropical forest, a cloud forest on the upper slopes, without any coevolution among its constituent species, ignored by recent writers on the ecology of St. Helena and Ascension as "a wholly artificial ecosystem" (Ashmole 2000, p 250). Today's ecologists are concerned about the effect these alien species have had on the endemic species of the island. At least four native species have been wiped out, and just as many are in danger of being so. Because of this some Ascension residents and ecologists are attempting to turn the area into a national park or forest so they can eradicate the alien species that are destroying the native ones.