by Staff Writers Berlin, Germany (SPX) Jan 11, 2013 Captain
William Mynors was not particularly creative as he sailed past a
remote island in the Indian Ocean on the 'Royal Mary', a ship
belonging to the British East India Company, on 25 December
1643. He named the 135-square-kilometre island, which he could
not even disembark on, 'Christmas Island'. In the image acquired
with the German Aerospace Center TerraSAR-X radar satellite, one
thing is clear - even today, tropical rainforest proliferates on
the island and the coastal cliffs continue to make life
difficult for mariners. The island is surrounded by some 80
kilometres of cliffs. The choppy waters of the surf on the south
coast are not easy to image clearly for the radar on TerraSAR-X
- the waves reflect the radar signals back to the satellite very
irregularly. It looks different in the bay between the only
harbour on the island, Flying Fish Cove in the northeast, and
West White Beach in the northwest: "When the image was acquired
on 26 November 2012, th