United States Minor Outlying Islands
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United States Minor Outlying Islands
The United States Minor Outlying Islands is a statistical designation applying to the minor outlying islands and groups of islands that comprise eight United States insular areas in the Pacific Ocean (Baker Island, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Midway Atoll, Palmyra Atoll, and Wake Island) and one in the Caribbean Sea (Navassa Island). It is defined by the International Organization for Standardization's ISO 3166-1 code. The entry code is ISO 3166-2:UM. While the strategically important islands scattered across Polynesia and Micronesia are relatively small, they are rich in history and nature. The nearly barren Howland is famous for being the island renowned American pilot Amelia Earhart intended to land on before she vanished during her round-the-world flight in 1937. Wake, home Wake Island rail, to a now extinct flightless bird, was the site of a Pitched battle, pitched Battle of Wake Island, World War II battle in 1941, and was an essential ...
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Pacific Ocean
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five Borders of the oceans, oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean, or, depending on the definition, to Antarctica in the south, and is bounded by the continents of Asia and Australia in the west and the Americas in the east. At in area (as defined with a southern Antarctic border), the Pacific Ocean is the largest division of the World Ocean and the hydrosphere and covers approximately 46% of Earth's water surface and about 32% of the planet's total surface area, larger than its entire land area ().Pacific Ocean
. ''Encyclopædia Britannica, Britannica Concise.'' 2008: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
The centers of both the Land and water hemispheres, water hemisphere and the Western Hemisphere, as well as the Pole of inaccessi ...
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Baker Island
Baker Island, once known as New Nantucket in the early 19th century, is a small, uninhabited atoll located just north of the Equator in the central Pacific Ocean, approximately southwest of Honolulu. Positioned almost halfway between Hawaii and Australia, its closest neighbor is Howland Island, situated to the north-northwest. Both Baker and Howland Islands have been claimed as territories of the United States since 1857, though the United Kingdom regarded them as part of the British Empire between 1897 and 1936 but did not actually annex them. They were not being used when a U.S. Colonization attempt was started in 1935, and the next year formal reassertion of U.S. sovereignty was issued. During WWII the Japanese Empire attacked the island, and it was evacuated and a small military base was established. The island was an important navigation beacon in the remote Pacific waters during and after WWII. In the 1970s it was made into a nature preserve and has remained so into the ...
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Wake Island Rail
The extinct Wake Island rail or Wake rail (''Hypotaenidia wakensis'') was a flightless rail and the only native land bird on the Pacific atoll of Wake. It was found on the islands of Wake and Wilkes, and Peale, which is separated from the others by a channel of about . It was hunted to extinction during World War II. Description The adult bird had a length of . The wing spread was between . The length of the tail was . The culmen was between and the length of the tarsus was . It was closely related to the buff-banded rail (''Hypotaenidia philippensis'') from the Philippines, which is able to fly. Genetic evidence indicates that amongst '' Gallirallus'' species it is most closely related to the Roviana rail and the buff-banded rail itself. Its appearance was dark greyish brown on the upperparts as well as on the crown, the lores and the cheeks. It was also characterized by ash brown underparts with striking narrow white bars on the belly, the breast, and the flanks. The u ...
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Amelia Earhart
Amelia Mary Earhart ( ; July 24, 1897 – January 5, 1939) was an American aviation pioneer. On July 2, 1937, she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the world. During her life, Earhart embraced celebrity culture and women's rights, and since her disappearance has become a global cultural figure. She was the first female pilot to fly solo non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean and set many other records. She was one of the first aviators to promote commercial air travel, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences, and was instrumental in the formation of Ninety-Nines, The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots. Earhart was born and raised in Atchison, Kansas, and developed a passion for adventure at a young age, steadily gaining flying experience from her twenties. In 1928, she became a celebrity after becoming the first female passenger to cross the Atlantic by airplane. In 1932, she became th ...
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Micronesia
Micronesia (, ) is a subregion of Oceania, consisting of approximately 2,000 small islands in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean. It has a close shared cultural history with three other island regions: Maritime Southeast Asia to the west, Polynesia to the east, and Melanesia to the south—as well as with the wider community of Austronesian peoples. The region has a tropical marine climate and is part of the Oceanian realm. It includes four main archipelagos—the Caroline Islands, the Gilbert Islands, the Mariana Islands, and the Marshall Islands — as well as numerous islands that are not part of any archipelago. Political control of areas within Micronesia varies depending on the island, and is distributed among six sovereign nations. Some of the Caroline Islands are part of the Republic of Palau and some are part of the Federated States of Micronesia (often shortened to "FSM" or "Micronesia"—not to be confused with the identical name for the overall region). The Gi ...
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Polynesia
Polynesia ( , ) is a subregion of Oceania, made up of more than 1,000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean. The indigenous people who inhabit the islands of Polynesia are called Polynesians. They have many things in common, including Polynesian languages, linguistic relations, Polynesian culture, cultural practices, and Tradition, traditional beliefs. In centuries past, they had a strong shared tradition of sailing and Polynesian navigation, using stars to navigate at night. The term was first used in 1756 by the French writer Charles de Brosses, who originally applied it to all the list of islands in the Pacific Ocean, islands of the Pacific. In 1831, Jules Dumont d'Urville proposed a narrower definition during a lecture at the Société de Géographie of Paris. By tradition, the islands located in the South Seas, southern Pacific have also often been called the South Sea Islands, and their inhabitants have been called South Sea Islanders. The Hawai ...
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ISO 3166-1
ISO 3166-1 (''Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 1: Country code'') is a standard defining codes for the names of countries, dependent territories, and special areas of geographical interest. It is the first part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization. It defines three sets of country codes: * ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 – two-letter country codes which are used most prominently for the Internet's country code top-level domains (with a few exceptions). * ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 – three-letter country codes which allow a better visual association between the codes and the country names than the alpha-2 codes. * ISO 3166-1 numeric – three-digit country codes which are identical to those developed and maintained by the United Nations Statistics Division, with the advantage of script (writing system) independence, and hence useful for people or systems using non-Latin scripts. The alphabetic ...
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International Organization For Standardization
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. Membership requirements are given in Article 3 of the ISO Statutes. ISO was founded on 23 February 1947, and () it has published over 25,000 international standards covering almost all aspects of technology and manufacturing. It has over 800 technical committees (TCs) and subcommittees (SCs) to take care of standards development. The organization develops and publishes international standards in technical and nontechnical fields, including everything from manufactured products and technology to food safety, transport, IT, agriculture, and healthcare. More specialized topics like electrical and electronic engineering are instead handled by the International Electrotechnical Commission.Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. 3 June 2021.Inte ...
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Caribbean Sea
The Caribbean Sea is a sea of the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean in the tropics of the Western Hemisphere, located south of the Gulf of Mexico and southwest of the Sargasso Sea. It is bounded by the Greater Antilles to the north from Cuba to Puerto Rico, the Lesser Antilles to the east from the Virgin Islands to Trinidad and Tobago, South America to the south from the Venezuela, Venezuelan coastline to the Colombia, Colombian coastline, and Central America and the Yucatán Peninsula to the west from Panama to Mexico. The Geopolitics, geopolitical region around the Caribbean Sea, including the numerous islands of the West Indies and adjacent coastal areas in the mainland of the Americas, is known as the Caribbean. The Caribbean Sea is one of the largest seas on Earth and has an area of about . The sea's deepest point is the Cayman Trough, between the Cayman Islands and Jamaica, at below sea level. The Caribbean coastline has many gulfs and bays: the Gulf of Gonâve, the Gul ...
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Palmyra Atoll
Palmyra Atoll (), also referred to as Palmyra Island, is one of the Line Islands, Northern Line Islands (southeast of Kingman Reef and north of Kiribati). It is located almost due south of the Hawaiian Islands, roughly one-third of the way between Hawaii and American Samoa. North America is about northeast and New Zealand the same distance southwest, placing the atoll at the approximate center of the Pacific Ocean. The land area is , with about 9 miles (14 km) of sea-facing coastline and reef. There is one boat anchorage (maritime), anchorage, known as West Lagoon, accessible from the sea by a narrow artificial channel and an old airstrip; during WW2, it was turned into a Naval Air Station for several years and used for training and refueling. It was shelled by a submarine in December 1941, days after the Attack on Pearl Harbor, but was not the site of a major battle. Palmyra has, over time, had many of its islets merged together, so the actual amount of contiguous land depend ...
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Midway Atoll
Midway Atoll (colloquialism, colloquial: Midway Islands; ; ) is a atoll in the North Pacific Ocean. Midway Atoll is an insular area of the United States and is an Insular area#Unorganized unincorporated territories, unorganized and unincorporated territory. The largest island is Sand Island, which has housing and an airstrip. Immediately east of Sand Island, across the narrow Brooks Channel, is Eastern Island, which is uninhabited and no longer has any facilities. Forming a rough, incomplete circle around the two main islands and creating Midway Lagoon is Spit Island, a narrow reef. Roughly equidistant between North America and Asia, Midway is the only island in the Hawaiian Islands, Hawaiian Archipelago that is not part of the state of Hawaii. Unlike the other Hawaiian islands, Midway observes Samoa Time Zone, Samoa Time (UTC−11:00, i.e., eleven hours behind Coordinated Universal Time), which is one hour behind the time in the Hawaii–Aleutian Time Zone used in Hawaii. Fo ...
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Kingman Reef
Kingman Reef () is a largely submerged, uninhabited, triangle-shaped reef, geologically an atoll, east-west and north-south, in the North Pacific Ocean, roughly halfway between the Hawaiian Islands and American Samoa. It has an area of 3 hectares (0.03 km2; 7.4 acres) and is an unincorporated territory of the United States in Oceania. The reef is administered by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service as the Kingman Reef National Wildlife Refuge. It was claimed by the US in 1859 and later used briefly as a stopover for commercial Pacific flying boat routes in the 1930s going to New Zealand; however, the route was changed with a different stopover. It was administered by the Navy from 1934 to 2000 and thereafter by the Fish and Wildlife Service. It has since become a marine protected area. In the 19th century, it was noted as a maritime hazard, earning the name Hazard Rocks, and is known to have been hit once in 1876. In the 21st century, it has been noted for its marin ...
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