-
Unseen tides and fierce sun remold Kingman Reef’s coral heart
Hardly any land stands above the water here. What appears on charts as Kingman Reef is, in physical terms, almost an argument with the sea: a mostly submerged coral atoll in the North Pacific, far southwest of Honolulu and north of American Samoa, with only the slightest scraps of dry ground showing at low tide.…
-
Outsized myths meet icy realities on Elephant Island
Few scraps of land have entered history so completely through desperation. In the Southern Ocean, off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula in the South Shetland chain, Elephant Island rises as an ice-clad, mountainous mass with no trees, no settlement, and almost no level ground. Its coast is a hard arrangement of cliffs, glaciers, rock,…
-
Seabird choruses return as Enderby Island loses invasive mammals
Few islands announce so clearly that they belong to birds, wind, and old seas rather than to people. Enderby Island lies at the northern edge of New Zealand’s subantarctic Auckland Islands, a small, low island facing the Southern Ocean with a kind of blunt exposure that gives it unusual force. It is not large, and…
