Cabo San Lucas

The white channel down the middle of this board is a crack. Baja was part of mainland Mexico until about ten million years ago, and it is still pulling away.

The Pacific Plate caught the peninsula and began dragging it northwest, tearing it off the continent along the same boundary that runs up into California and becomes the San Andreas Fault. The Gulf of California — the Sea of Cortez — is simply the gap that opened behind it, flooded by the Pacific. It is a young ocean by geological standards, and it is still widening at roughly five centimetres a year.

Cabo San Lucas sits at the very tip, on the corner where the open Pacific meets the gulf. Everything north of it on this board is drifting, slowly and steadily, toward Alaska.