Diego Garcia

S17-43-40
Flight 41G; 7.1S, 72.1E, 09:37:33 GMT, 11 Oct 1984

Diego Garcia is in the Chagos Archipelago, south of the equator in the Indian Ocean. It sits on the same submarine ridge as the Maldives and the Laccadives. The atoll is totally different in structure from others in the northern Indian Ocean. The structure is closer to Pacific Ocean atolls. Adjacent to the Chagos Archipelago is a deep-sea trench that gives their underlying platform a completely different oceancrust structure from that of the ridge to the north of the equator. It is this structural contrast that has aided the formation of Diego Garcia into an outline that seems alien to the Indian Ocean.

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