-
Seabirds anchor conservation debates around Salas y Gómez’s future
Few pieces of land look less negotiable. Rising from the southeastern Pacific more than 3,000 kilometers west of continental Chile and roughly 390 kilometers east of Rapa Nui, Salas y Gómez is not a place that invites settlement so much as a place that tests the very idea of it. The island is tiny, barren,…
-
At Berkner Island, science unravels Antarctica’s hidden mechanics
Almost everything about this place resists the ordinary idea of an island. Berkner Island lies in Antarctica, enclosed not by open sea but by the floating mass of the Ronne Ice Shelf in the southern Weddell Sea. It is large by any standard—about 320 kilometers long and roughly 135 kilometers wide—yet for long stretches of…
-
A tiny Arctic outpost reframes the law around Jeannette Island
Named from a disaster, fixed in ice Far above the Siberian mainland, where the Laptev and East Siberian seas merge into a long regime of pack ice, Jeannette Island rises as a dark, abrupt interruption in a white world. It belongs to the De Long group in Russia’s New Siberian archipelago, and even by high-Arctic…
