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Ilha da Queimada Grande: The Forest Beyond the Lighthouse
Beyond a stretch of Atlantic water, a forested island gives an approaching sailor a place on which to fix the eye. Queimada Grande Island (Ilha da Queimada Grande), off southeastern Brazil, invites attention beyond that first outline: to the leaves, the air within the vegetation, the ground enclosed by the shore. From the sea, the…
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Bikini Atoll: the lagoon beyond the empty shore
Across the Pacific Ocean, a ring of islands offers the prospect of land continuing beyond the first visible shore. At Bikini Atoll (Pikinni), the view opens inward to an immense lagoon, enclosed by scattered islands and an oval reef. Water occupies far more of the atoll than land does, and light on its surface leaves…
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Chagos Archipelago: the shores people were made to leave
Beyond a long reach of central tropical Indian Ocean water, separate islands come into view rather than a continuous coast. The Chagos Archipelago (Chagos Islands) invites the imagination to linger over that approach: water giving way to land, with more water between the shores ahead. For an admirer of old voyages, the attraction begins there,…
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Svalbard: a high coast under Newtontoppen
First sight was likely a weathered wall beyond gray water: broken ridges and a pale brow of glacier holding to the horizon while floes clicked at a hull. In that light the land stayed close yet withheld. This is Svalbard (Svalbard), a high Arctic archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. Early crews felt their way in…
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Nauru: reef ring and the mined heart
On a long swell with nothing to measure but sky and water, the first approach would have met a pale ring where surf folded over coral, and beyond it a stony rise. Nauru sits in the central Pacific Ocean just below the Equator, a raised atoll whose rim flashes white and whose interior lifts like…
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North Sentinel Island: arrows over the uplifted reef
A scatter of shore fires, glimpsed across heaving water, was once the only sign: a rim of light pricking the darkness as a ship held off. That is how an East India Company vessel first marked North Sentinel Island in 1771, in the Bay of Bengal, a low green shape held behind a pale line…
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Tromelin Island: fifteen years on the Isle of Sand
From the sea, Tromelin Island shows almost nothing of itself: a pale strip of sand and low scrub, barely seven meters above the surf, with water some 4,000 meters deep on every side. Île Tromelin, as France calls it, lies alone in the western Indian Ocean, about 560 kilometers north of Réunion and roughly 450…
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Wind-scarred bunkers, thawing tundra and seabirds remap October Revolution Island
Measured not by cities or roads but by ice caps and drifting pack, October Revolution Island belongs to a scale of geography that unsettles ordinary ideas of land. It lies in the Russian High Arctic, the largest island of the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago, between the Kara Sea and the Laptev Sea, far north of Siberia.…
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Tussock revival forces a rethink of Saunders Island management
Wind is the first real architect here. It combs the long grass into pale seams, presses low over dark hills, and reaches the shore in a confusion of surf, kelp, and cold light. In the northwestern Falkland Islands, off the coast of West Falkland, Saunders Island feels both inhabited and withheld: a place with sheep…
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San Felix Island mediates geopolitical claims, wildlife and remote livelihoods
Far out in the southeastern Pacific More than any story told about it, distance defines San Felix Island. It lies far off the coast of Chile, in the Desventuradas Islands, a small and exposed outpost of volcanic land in an immense field of ocean. The nearest continental shore is not near in any ordinary sense.…
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Beacon ruins and migrating seals make Rudolf Island a paradox
Beyond the last practical map Few places on Earth seem arranged so completely for absence. Rudolf Island lies at the extreme northern end of Franz Josef Land, deep in the Russian High Arctic, with Cape Fligely on its shore marking one of the northernmost pieces of land in the Eastern Hemisphere. The island is small…
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Between wreckage and tundra, Lady Franklin Island keeps slow secrets
Named for grief, set in ice Few places carry so much nineteenth-century emotion into such a hard northern setting. Lady Franklin Island lies off the southeast coast of Baffin Island in Nunavut, Canada, facing the cold waters of Davis Strait and the mouths of Cumberland Sound. It is a small, steep-sided island of dark Arctic…
