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Guadalupe Island is a 22-mile-long inactive volcanic island off the western coast of Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula. The island is shaped roughly like a seahorse without a tail, with Mount Augusta to the north forming the head. Rising steeply from the Pacific to 1,300 metres (4,260 feet), the mountain disrupts the flow of ocean winds along with any marine Stratocumulus clouds they might carry. The result can be a cloud wake, or gap, and alternating cloudy swirls known as von Kármán vortices. Few have observed these swirls from the ocean below. The patterns in the low cloud are simply too broad to appreciate from a foreshortened view. But astronauts 260 miles (420 km) up on the International Space Station can certainly spot them – and confirm the seahorse of Guadalupe Island has finally grown a tail that is over a hundred miles long.