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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.…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Standing apart, Disappointment Island rewrites expectations of remoteness
A name earned in rough water South of New Zealand, where the Southern Ocean strips away any illusion of softness, Disappointment Island sits as a hard, cliff-bound outlier of the Auckland Islands group. It is small, uninhabited, and difficult to approach, a place whose title sounds theatrical until the surrounding facts make it plain. The…
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Small atoll experiments on Birnie Island raise thorny conservation questions
A low island in a very large ocean Few places make human absence feel so complete. Birnie Island lies in the Phoenix Islands of the central Pacific, part of the Republic of Kiribati, a small, flat coral island ringed by reef and exposed to a sweep of sea that seems to erase scale. It is…
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Forged by fire and tide, Barren Island surprises ecologists
Few islands advertise their nature so bluntly. Barren Island, in the Andaman Sea east of India’s main Andaman chain, is uninhabited not because history forgot it but because fire never fully did. It is the only confirmed active volcano in South Asia, a dark, isolated cone rising from deep water about 135 kilometers northeast of…
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Scientists map subglacial volcanoes under Siple Island ice cap
Not quite an island, not quite gone Maps still give it a name, and that simple act feels almost defiant. Siple Island lies along the coast of Marie Byrd Land in West Antarctica, near the edge of the Siple Coast, but it is not the kind of island most people imagine. It rises from the…
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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…
