-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Windswept ridges and fallout trace human histories on Komsomolets Island
At the top edge of the map Few islands seem less interested in human company. Komsomolets Island lies in the high Russian Arctic, the northernmost major island of the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago, set between the Kara Sea and the Laptev Sea and divided from October Revolution Island by the Red Army Strait. Even by polar…
-
Buried Arctic archives resurface on Prince Patrick Island
Few pieces of land seem so thoroughly given over to weather. In the western Canadian Arctic, beyond the better-known channels of the Northwest Passage, Prince Patrick Island lies as a broad, spare mass in the Queen Elizabeth Islands of Nunavut, bounded by ice-choked seas for much of the year and visited more often by pressure…
-
Cold War relics on Graham Bell Island map shifting Arctic geopolitics
There are islands that feel discovered, absorbed into routes and narratives, and then there are islands that still seem to stand outside ordinary time, known mostly through ice reports, expedition logs, and military records. Graham Bell Island belongs to the second kind. It lies at the northeastern edge of Franz Josef Land in the Russian…
-
A century of maps and myths reframes Marcus Island
Names can mislead, and this one has done so for more than a century. Marcus Island is the older Western name for Minamitorishima, a tiny Japanese coral island set far out in the northwestern Pacific, almost absurdly alone. It lies southeast of mainland Japan and east of the Ogasawara Islands, closer in spirit to the…
-
A submerged fortress of predators, Malpelo Island tests conservation resolve
Ships do not so much arrive here as concede, after days of Pacific distance, that a jagged mass of black rock truly exists where the horizon had seemed determined to remain empty. Malpelo Island rises far off Colombia’s mainland, in the eastern tropical Pacific, as a steep volcanic outcrop with almost no gentle edge to…
