The plates rolled over one another and stresses caused violent fracturing of the Indo-Australian plate beneath the island. Once part of a much larger landmass, ancient Gondwanaland, Skull Island sat square near the turbulent boundary of the Indo-Australian and Eurasian tectonic plates. The very rock of which the island was built was treacherous. Jutting out of the perilous sea, west of Sumatra, the island was in the heart of a region afflicted by intense magnetic anomalies and violent sea storms. Little wonder Skull Island lay undiscovered for so long.
The secrets that were learned, in that short space of time, were all that would ever be revealed. When Skull Island finally succumbed to inevitability and sank, taking with it its mysterious people, monsters, and undiscovered history into the sea, the legend-become-reality became legend again. In the intervening years between revelation and oblivion, Skull Island hosted just seven short Project Legacy expeditions. Barely fifteen years after its discovery, Skull Island and all its wondrous secrets were lost to the waves, the island torn to pieces by the same irresistible geologic force that had preserved it for so many eons. Kong’s brief appearance and destruction in Manhattan in 1933 paralleled the discovery and loss of the island.
After careful exploration by a team of geologists, the expedition realized that Skull Island was a doomed oddity, a scab on the earth’s crust that was about to be scratched off. A huge earthquake sank one part of the island, killing five team members. It was during the second incursion, in 1936, that the truth of Skull Island’s geological instability became clear. Project Legacy was expanded to a long-term study, with annual expeditions the long-term goal was of establishing a permanent base of operations on the island. With countless discoveries of new species and new behaviours every day, it became painfully clear that decades of study might scrape the surface of what the island had hidden from the world for so long. The most important realization of this 1935 trip was the understanding that Skull Island was too new, too strange and, above all, too dangerous to explore and study in so short a space of time. Project Legacy – as it was called – suffered its own share of mishaps and attrition, but it was a far cry from the earlier, ill-founded attempts. Lead by Carl Denham, this three-month expedition set out to systematically explore and document the island. After a year of disastrous excursions and tragic loss of life, a properly prepared, jointly managed and financed effort was finally organized by the three biggest interested concerns. Skull Island ate expeditions with all the appetite of the full-grown V-Rexes that ruled the landmass in Kong’s absence. Only a handful of the two dozen expeditions successfully made landfall, and – of those – half were woefully unprepared for the terrors that awaited them. The race of the century was on: Rival expeditions fought for exclusivity and justification, each asserting its own legal standing to be first on the island. In the wake of the island's unveiling, universities and private organizations across the planet fumbled to dispatch teams to investigate and catalogue its wonders. Kong’s chest-beating roar at the summit of the Empire State Building heralded the greatest discovery of the century – arguably, the millennium. Not since the discovery of the New World had mankind been offered such an opportunity to explore a land trapped in time. If Kong had shocked the scientific world, Skull Island’s emergence from the shroud of legend into reality shook it to its core.
But Kong was just the beginning.Īn entire island, bursting with prehistoric wonders, exists. The twenty-five-foot-tall ape delivered the scientific community a one-two punch that sent it reeling with the impact of this incredible discovery and subsequent tragic loss. In 1933 Carl Denham shocked the world when he unveiled King Kong to a stunned crowd at the Alhambra Theatre.
#Skull and bones island series
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