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A century of maps and myths reframes Marcus Island
Names can mislead, and this one has done so for more than a century. Marcus Island is the older Western name for Minamitorishima, a tiny Japanese coral island set far out in the northwestern Pacific, almost absurdly alone. It lies southeast of mainland Japan and east of the Ogasawara Islands, closer in spirit to the…
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A submerged fortress of predators, Malpelo Island tests conservation resolve
Ships do not so much arrive here as concede, after days of Pacific distance, that a jagged mass of black rock truly exists where the horizon had seemed determined to remain empty. Malpelo Island rises far off Colombia’s mainland, in the eastern tropical Pacific, as a steep volcanic outcrop with almost no gentle edge to…
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Beneath ash and wind, Zavodovski Island teems with life
Black volcanic slopes rise from the Southern Ocean with an abruptness that feels almost theatrical, as if a curtain of mist had opened for a moment and revealed a stage still in the act of making itself. Zavodovski Island, the northernmost of the South Sandwich Islands, lies in one of the loneliest stretches of sea…
