Northwest rocky shore on Ilha Do Maio (Cape Verde archipelago).

The northwest coast of Maio Island in the Cape Verde archipelago features strong surf against basaltic and limestone rocky shores due to wave refraction stimulated by strong and persistent northeast trade winds in the North Atlantic Ocean. The view above looks to the south towards a line of beaches dominated by carbonate sand derived mainly from the breakdown of mollusk shells. At the most sheltered SW end of the island, an extensive salt lagoon is well developed, which was the locus of a thriving salt trade during much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the opposite direction located off the north end of the island, submarine banks are formed by rhodoliths (unattached, spherical growths of coralline red algae) subject to disturbance by major storms and removal to inter-tidal and supra-tidal settings as beach-rock and coastal over-wash deposits. A nascent island industry took root on the north coast, where limekilns were constructed for the production of lime used locally as mortar and as white wash. See the accompanying article in this issue of the JCR by Johnson et al., which details the island's coastal geomorphology and rhodolith deposits. (Photograph and caption by Markes E. Johnson, Department of Geosciences, Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, U.S.A.)