Hanga Roa, July 12: Tourists and scientists poured onto the remote and mysterious Easter Island ahead of Sunday’s solar eclipse, a mixed blessing of sorts for the tiny Pacific outpost.
An estimated 4 000 tourists, scientists, photographers, filmmakers and journalists flocked to the Chilean island of only 160 square kilometres on Saturday, doubling the population of the barren isle that already suffers from water pollution and deforestation.
Conditions are anything but normal on Easter Island, deemed by astronomers the best place to witness Sunday’s alignment of sun, moon and Earth for a fleeting four minutes and 41 seconds.
Some weather forecasts, however, warn of cloudy skies – potentially dashing hopes of a clear view here.
The total solar eclipse will begin at 18:15 GMT, when the umbra or shadow falls on the South Pacific about 700km southeast of Tonga, according to veteran Nasa eclipse specialist, Fred Espanak.
Daytime darkness
It will then zip in an easterly arc across the Pacific, eventually cloaking Easter Island and its mysterious giant statues at around 20:11 GMT.
Parts of the globe will be plunged into daytime darkness along a narrow corridor about 11 000km long across the South Pacific.
And the eclipse, in Tahiti for example, has a chance of upstaging even the start of the World Cup final between Spain and the Netherlands in South Africa at 18:30 GMT.
Easter Island Governor Pedro Edmunds Paoa told AFP the island “has the capacity to absorb this number of tourists,” similar to the influx in the austral summer in January.
But authorities have increased security, especially around key heritage sites, including the 3 000-year-old large stone statues, or moai, that put Easter Island, a far-flung ethnic Polynesian point of reference, on the world culture map.
In the original islanders’ ancient lore, such an eclipse “would have been seen as a very powerful signal of upcoming upheaval,” as their worldview was rooted in the natural world, in “the earth, the sea and especially the sky,” said Patricia Vargas of the University of Chile.
—Agencies