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Category Archives: Islands

Minecraft: Darkshard Islands Ep.4 – THE JOURNEY w/Jassen & RowDe – Video

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Minecraft: Darkshard Islands Ep.4 - THE JOURNEY w/Jassen RowDe
Leave a LIKE For Darkshard! 😀 Become A Myt Bow - http://bit.ly/subjassen Our goal while playing Darkshard Islands is to find lost pages in dungeons, and bring them back in order to unlock...

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Minecraft: Darkshard Islands Ep.4 - THE JOURNEY w/Jassen & RowDe - Video

Cliff Jumping at Las Grietas, Santa Cruz, Galapagos Islands – Video

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Cliff Jumping at Las Grietas, Santa Cruz, Galapagos Islands
Possibly the most magical, surreal place in the whole of the Galapagos Islands is Las Grietas (the cliffs) in Santa Cruz near Puerto Ayora - a salt water canyon between tall green cliffs, perfect...

By: Torks H

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Cliff Jumping at Las Grietas, Santa Cruz, Galapagos Islands - Video

Philippines Vs China – 9 Dash Map Claim and the Uninhabited Islands – Video

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Philippines Vs China - 9 Dash Map Claim and the Uninhabited Islands
Mr. Michael Fuchs today at our efforts to modernize these alliances including new agreements like the enhanced defense cooperation agreement with the Philippines and the U.S. Australia Force...

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Philippines Vs China - 9 Dash Map Claim and the Uninhabited Islands - Video

Bird Droppings Led to U.S. Possession of Newly Protected Pacific Islands

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Blame it on "guano mania." A craze for natural fertilizer made from bird droppings spurred the U.S. to take possession of a group of remote Pacific islands in the 19th century, and now those islands are home to the world's largest marine reserve.

On Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced an expansion of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument to cover nearly 490,000 square miles, six times larger than its previous size. (See "U.S. Creates Largest Protected Area in the World, 3X Larger Than California.")

The Guano Islands Act of 1856 made it possible. The United States long ago used the act to claim islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean as territory, which means that today the U.S. government has the legal authority to protect waters up to 200 miles out from each island, an area known as the exclusive economic zone.

NG STAFF. SOURCE: U.S. GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE

For the Pacific Remote Islands preserve, this includes Palmyra, an atoll of about 50 low-lying islands that were first claimed for the United States in 1859 under the Guano Islands federal statute, which remains on the books. In all, the law claimed five Pacific Remote Island Areas now in the reserve, including the triangular Kingman Reef and tiny Baker, Howland, and Jarvis Islands.

Ultimately, the islands of the newly expanded monument owe their present-day good fortune to the digestive tracts of the abundant seabirds that inhabited them a century and a half ago.

White Gold

Guano was fertilizer as good as it got at the time for fertilizing farmer's fields to feed a growing world population, before the development of synthetic ammonia fertilizers in the early part of the 20th century.

"American farmers first learned of the powerful fertilizing properties of guano in the mid-1840's," wrote legal historian Christina Duffy Posna of Columbia University Law School in New York in a 2005 essay on the American "guano islands."

Peruvians had known about it for centuries and enjoyed a monopoly over the Chincha Islands, where birds had deposited tons of what came to be known as "white gold." Hundreds of thousands of seabirds can nest on a single island, and migrating birds overwinter on them as well. The tightly packed birds cover the small islands, which receive little rain and intense sunlight, perfect conditions for drying out guano deposits.

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Bird Droppings Led to U.S. Possession of Newly Protected Pacific Islands

Obama extends vast marine reserve in central Pacific Ocean

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Building on a legacy left by President George W. Bush, President Obama has extended the reach of the Pacific Remote Islands National Marine Monument sixfold to nearly half a million square miles, turning it into the world's largest marine sanctuary, one fully protected from commercial fishing and deep-sea mining.

The move came via a presidential proclamation Thursday, issued under the 1906 Antiquities Act. The act allows a president to set aside for preservation structures or objects of historic or scientific interest on federal lands.

In 2009, former President Bush established the monument, centered on seven islands and atolls the US administers in the central Pacific Ocean. Each island or atoll was protected out to a distance of 50 nautical miles, giving the monument an area of 83,000 square miles.

In his proclamation, Mr. Obama extended the monument's reach out to the full 200-mile limit waters falling within US's exclusive economic zone around three of the islands and atolls. This raises the monument's collective area to 490,000 square miles.

Had the president included the other four islands in the expansion, the monument would have covered about 780,000 square miles. But after taking into account public comments, as well as the administration's own scientific assessment, the White House concluded that the expansion that became official today represents appropriately tailored and meaningful protections, according to administration officials.

Marine-conservation specialists are elated by the move.

"We're really thrilled. It's a huge step forward for the ocean. It's going to help spur other countries to take action," says Sarah Chasis, who heads the oceans program at the National Resources Defense Council in New York.

The White House signaled its intention to expand the marine monument in June during an international conference in Washington that focused on marine conservation. Secretary of State John Kerry convened the two-day meeting to build support for more-ambitious efforts to safeguard the environmental health of the world's oceans.

The key threats include over-fishing, pollution, and rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels and from land-use changes. Rising CO2 levels have triggered global warming, and the oceans have become increasingly acidic as they take up much of the CO2 humans have pumped into the atmosphere.

The impact of warming on the oceans on marine life already is appearing as warm-water species migrate northward out of their historic ecological regions. Meanwhile, acidification threatens corals and many types of shell-building marine life, and by extension, the animals higher up the food chain that rely on them, researchers say.

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Obama extends vast marine reserve in central Pacific Ocean


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