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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Beneath ash and wind, Zavodovski Island teems with life
Black volcanic slopes rise from the Southern Ocean with an abruptness that feels almost theatrical, as if a curtain of mist had opened for a moment and revealed a stage still in the act of making itself. Zavodovski Island, the northernmost of the South Sandwich Islands, lies in one of the loneliest stretches of sea…
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When glaciers relent, Wrangel Island becomes a diplomatic crucible
Long before most people ever saw it, sailors argued over whether it was there at all. In the high Arctic between the East Siberian and Chukchi seas, north of Chukotka and well above the Siberian mainland, Wrangel Island spent decades as a rumor on the horizon: a dark line glimpsed through weather, then lost again…
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After nuclear tests, Johnston Island charts unexpected ecological revival
Few specks of land have carried a burden as strange as this one: a low coral outpost in the North Pacific, far from any continent, repeatedly remade by military purpose and then left to weather the memory of it. Johnston Island lies roughly 860 miles southwest of Hawaiʻi, part of the United States Minor Outlying…
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Field notebooks and ice cores unlock the past of Peter I Island
A black volcanic mass rises from the Bellingshausen Sea with the abruptness of something not meant for company. Peter I Island lies off the coast of Antarctica, far from regular shipping lanes and farther still from any ordinary idea of an island as refuge. What appears on a map as a compact shape is, in…
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Tracing the quiet transformation of Surtsey into habitat
It began as an argument between fire and water, witnessed in real time. In November 1963, south of Iceland in the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago, the North Atlantic heaved, darkened, and broke open. Columns of ash and steam climbed into the winter sky as a submarine eruption forced its way above the surface, building land where there…
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Coral resurgence and legacy debris complicate Jarvis Island recovery
Nothing about this place invites arrival. A low strip of coral and rubble breaks the Pacific almost on the Equator, far south of Hawaii and far from regular sea lanes, without a harbor, without fresh water, without even the dramatic relief that helps many remote islands announce themselves. Jarvis Island is difficult to see, difficult…
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A fragile ecosystem on Moffen Island reveals Arctic resilience
At the far northern rim of the Svalbard archipelago, where charts begin to look spare and the sea behaves like weather more than water, Moffen Island lies as a low ring of sand and shingle beyond 80 degrees north. It is less a dramatic landmass than a pale interruption in the Arctic Ocean: flat, exposed,…
