And the reef in the picture was part of tiny Nikumaroro Island, in the mostly uninhabited
Phoenix Islands.
Mass coral bleaching and mortality were reported in the
Phoenix Islands during the moderate 2002/03 El Nino (Obura and Mangubhai 2011), and coral bleaching with limited mortality was reported at Howland and Baker Islands during the moderate 2009/10 El Nino (Vargas-Angel et al.
In our Autumn 2013 edition, Earth Island Journal reported that President Anote Tong of the Pacific island nation of Kiribati had failed to fulfill his promises to close the
Phoenix Islands Protected Area to commercial fishing --despite having received a huge amount of international praise for his supposed environmental leadership.
It is based largely on the first piece of that puzzle: Kiribati's
Phoenix Islands Protected Area, a protected patch of Ocean that's larger than the state of California.
And the shared expedition will also eradicate rodents from US-administered Palmyra Atoll and the
Phoenix Islands Protected Area owned by Kiribati.
The
Phoenix Islands have never had any significant permanent population.
Eight scattered coral atolls barely above sea level in the equatorial western Pacific are the core of the world's largest marine conservation reserve, the
Phoenix Islands Protected Area, established in 2008 by the government of Kiribati.
Tong is also getting kudos in the scientific and environmental communities for giving back to the world with his important conservation initiative: creation of the
Phoenix Islands Protected Area, a remote archipelago of eight coral atolls and two submerged reef systems in an expanse of ocean totaling 410,000 square kilometers, roughly the size of California.
The small Pacific island nation of Kiribati has created the world's largest protected marine reserve--the 410 500-square-kilometre
Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), one of the planet's last intact coral archipelagos currently threatened by over-fishing and climate change.
Accordingly, Colorado was directed to proceed to and search the
Phoenix Islands. Beginning on 7 July, Colorado's three aircraft under of the command of Lieutenant John O.
Another theory now being explored in an expedition partly backed by National Geographic is that Earhart and Noonan ended up hundreds of miles southeast of the Marshall Islands, landing on the atoll Nikumaroro in the
Phoenix Islands. But 11 earlier expeditions there did not yield any concrete evidence.
So it was a great disappointment to read Christopher Pala's article ("Something's Fishy," Autumn 2013) about the state of marine protections in the
Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA).
