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Small atoll experiments on Birnie Island raise thorny conservation questions
A low island in a very large ocean Few places make human absence feel so complete. Birnie Island lies in the Phoenix Islands of the central Pacific, part of the Republic of Kiribati, a small, flat coral island ringed by reef and exposed to a sweep of sea that seems to erase scale. It is…
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Forged by fire and tide, Barren Island surprises ecologists
Few islands advertise their nature so bluntly. Barren Island, in the Andaman Sea east of India’s main Andaman chain, is uninhabited not because history forgot it but because fire never fully did. It is the only confirmed active volcano in South Asia, a dark, isolated cone rising from deep water about 135 kilometers northeast of…
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Scientists map subglacial volcanoes under Siple Island ice cap
Not quite an island, not quite gone Maps still give it a name, and that simple act feels almost defiant. Siple Island lies along the coast of Marie Byrd Land in West Antarctica, near the edge of the Siple Coast, but it is not the kind of island most people imagine. It rises from the…
