Academy Bay

It is home to the Charles Darwin Research Station, founded in 1959 to preserve and study the Galapagos wildlife.

Wildlife includes sea lions, and lava flows come up to the edge of the water.

Scuba diving is particularly popular, as water temperatures remain comfortable year round (18–25 °C) and visibility is generally excellent (10–20 m).

Academy Bay is an example of a graben structure: a down-dropped block bound by faults.

This kind of structure is characteristic of extensional deformation of the Earth's crust.