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What Hans Island underscores about fragile northern sovereignty
A shard in the narrows Few pieces of land have done so much with so little. Hans Island is a bare, rocky outcrop in the center of the Kennedy Channel, the narrow waterway between Ellesmere Island in Canada and Greenland, part of the strait system that links Baffin Bay with the Arctic Ocean. It is…
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Scoured by phosphate mining, Malden Island shelters fragile coral regeneration
Few islands look so finished and so forsaken at once. Malden Island lies in the central Pacific, part of the Republic of Kiribati’s remote Line Islands, a low, triangular platform of raised coral and limestone set in a vast field of ocean. There are no mountains to announce it from afar, no permanent settlement, no…
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Less visited than most, Herald Island holds unexpected histories
Few pieces of land have entered history so decisively by refusing rescue. In the high Arctic, north of the Siberian mainland and west of Wrangel Island, Herald Island rises from the Chukchi Sea as a dark, abrupt mass of rock and ice, small on the map and forbidding in reality. It belongs to Russia’s Chukotka…
