-
Wind-carved cliffs and endemic orchids crown Clarion Island
Few places look so final on a chart and yet belong so unmistakably to a living nation. Clarion Island lies alone in the Pacific, the westernmost and most remote of Mexico’s Revillagigedo Islands, more than 700 kilometers from the mainland. It is uninhabited, difficult to approach, and seldom seen except by naval patrols, researchers, and…
-
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…
-
Storm-battered nesting grounds at Ile aux Cochons prompt conservation reassessment
A black mass in a vacant quarter of ocean Ile aux Cochons belongs to the French Southern and Antarctic Lands, yet even in a territory defined by distance it stands apart. The island lies in the Crozet archipelago of the southern Indian Ocean, far from regular sea routes and far from settlement, a steep volcanic…
-
For a handful of keepers, Hopen Island measures time differently
Few inhabited places on earth feel so provisional. In the southeastern reaches of the Svalbard archipelago, between the Barents Sea and the routes of weather moving out of the Arctic Ocean, Hopen Island lies long and narrow, a spare strip of rock and frozen ground about 33 kilometers in length and only a few kilometers…
-
Wolves, skulls and stone tools on Zhokhov Island rewrite Arctic origins
Few places have altered what scholars know about the human Arctic as sharply as Zhokhov Island. Set in Russia’s High Arctic, in the De Long group of the East Siberian Sea, it lies far north of the Siberian mainland within the New Siberian archipelago, a piece of tundra and frozen ground exposed to one of…
-
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…
-
Living between time zones, Little Diomede Island balances two worlds
Between two nations and on the lip of the Arctic, Little Diomede Island rises from the Bering Strait with a blunt, improbable steepness, a mass of dark rock surrounded by moving ice, violent currents, and one of the most politically charged stretches of water on earth. In clear weather, the view from its shore reaches…
-
Guano, coral and wind govern the stark ecology of Rawaki Island
A low line in the Phoenix Islands Far from the usual traffic of the Pacific, Rawaki Island lies in the Phoenix Islands of Kiribati, a narrow, uninhabited strip of coral land once more widely known as Phoenix Island itself. It is not large. The island rises only slightly above the surrounding ocean, an atoll islet…
