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Driven by a duck’s return, Laysan Island finds balance
Far out in the Northwestern Hawaiian chain, beyond the busy imagination most people attach to Hawaiʻi, a low ring of coral and sand holds a shallow lake in its center and lets the Pacific work at its edges without interruption. Laysan Island lies roughly 1,500 kilometers northwest of Honolulu, inside the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument,…
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Currents, canoes and driftwood stitch Pikelot into memory
A dot that has altered fate In the western Pacific, between the better-known names of Micronesia, there is a scrap of coral so small that many maps barely dignify it with a mark. Pikelot lies in the Caroline Islands, part of the Federated States of Micronesia, and belongs to the state of Yap. It is…
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An Antarctic crossroads of exploration and wildlife, Petermann Island endures
Not every Antarctic island announces itself with scale. Some emerge instead as a compact disturbance in a world of ice and water: a low, dark mass off the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, edged by snow, ringed by drifting brash, and made suddenly conspicuous by life. Petermann Island lies in the Wilhelm Archipelago, just…
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Cartographers and seabirds collide on Joinville Island
Few places look so decisively removed from ordinary human scale. Off the northeastern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, beyond the cluttered ice and broken water of the Antarctic Sound, Joinville Island lies in a zone where maps stop feeling abstract and start reading like weather reports. It is the largest island of the Joinville Island…
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Outmatched by thawing ice, Adelaide Island reshapes Antarctic science
Few islands look less like a refuge. Off the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula, beyond the more frequently named stations and straits of the northern peninsula, Adelaide Island lies long and mountainous under persistent weather, separated from the mainland by Marguerite Bay and the narrow run of The Gullet. On a map it appears…
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A poisoned history yields unexpected hope on Hawadax Island
A place renamed after a reckoning Long before its newer name began to appear in conservation reports and maps, this Aleutian island was known for damage that could be counted in feathers, eggs, and silence. It lies in the western reaches of Alaska’s Aleutian chain, part of the Near Islands group, where low tundra and…
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Named for a day, Caroline Island watches calendars and tides
Longitude does some of the storytelling here. Near 150 degrees west, far south of Hawaiʻi and still farther from any continental shore, Caroline Island lies in the southern Line Islands of Kiribati, a broken ring of coral enclosing lagoons of startling clarity. The atoll is low, narrow, and almost level with the sea, its highest…
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Snow-buried diaries made Kvitøya a reluctant monument
There are places so far inside the Arctic that even the map seems to hesitate before naming them. Kvitøya lies at the northeastern edge of Svalbard, washed by the Barents Sea and pressed by pack ice for much of the year, a near-circular island whose very name means “White Island.” The name is not poetic…
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Winter storms and thawing permafrost reshape Clavering Island shoreline
Few places look so thoroughly claimed by cold. Clavering Island lies off the northeast coast of Greenland, separated from the mainland by narrow sounds and fjords in a sector of the Arctic where rock, ice, and sea seem to negotiate every visible boundary. It sits within what is now Northeast Greenland National Park, one of…
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Tucked into currents, Flint Island births stubborn pockets of life
Far out in the southern Line Islands, where the central Pacific seems to thin into glare and distance, Flint Island lies low against the horizon, an atoll so remote that its very scale feels deceptive. It belongs to Kiribati, yet it sits far from the country’s better-known inhabited atolls, about as isolated as a coral…
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Relics, research and ice reveal Alexander Island as a layered archive
Long before most people ever see it on a map, Alexander Island exists as a problem of scale. It lies off the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, divided from that mainland by George VI Sound, and yet it is so large that calling it an island can feel almost misleading. At roughly 390 kilometers…
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Storms return, but Gardner Island keeps an uneasy calm
Names can drift far from the places they once marked, and few islands show that more clearly than Gardner Island, the low coral atoll now officially known as Nikumaroro in the Phoenix Islands of Kiribati. It lies deep in the central Pacific, roughly southeast of Howland Island, a narrow ring of land around a lagoon,…
