The Northern Cook Islands is one of the two chains of

atoll An atoll () is a ring-shaped island, including a coral rim that encircles a lagoon partially or completely. There may be coral islands or cays on the rim. Atolls are located in warm tropical or subtropical oceans and seas where corals can ...

s which make up the

Cook Islands ) , image_map = Cook Islands on the globe (small islands magnified) (Polynesia centered).svg , capital = Avarua , coordinates = , largest_city = Avarua , official_languages = , langu ...

. Lying in a horizontal band between 9° and 13°30' south of the

Equator The equator is a circle of latitude, about in circumference, that divides Earth into the Northern and Southern hemispheres. It is an imaginary line located at 0 degrees latitude, halfway between the North and South poles. The term can al ...

, the chain consists of the atolls of

Manihiki 250px, Map of Manihiki Atoll Manihiki is an atoll in the northern group of the Cook Islands known informally as the "Island of Pearls". It is located in the Northern Cook Island chain, approximately north of the capital island of Rarotonga, ma ...

, Nassau, Penrhyn,

Pukapuka Pukapuka, formerly Danger Island, is a coral atoll in the northern group of the Cook Islands in the Pacific Ocean. It is one of most remote islands of the Cook Islands, situated about northwest of Rarotonga. On this small island, an ancient ...

Rakahanga Rakahanga is part of the Cook Islands, situated in the central-southern Pacific Ocean. The unspoilt atoll is from the Cook Islands' Capital city, capital, Rarotonga, and lies south of the equator. Its nearest neighbour is Manihiki which is jus ...

and Suwarrow, along with the submerged Tema Reef.

Geography

The chain forms a roughly inverted triangular shape, stretching from Penrhyn in the northeast to Pukapuka in the northwest and to Suwarrow in the south. The Northern Cook Islands are separated from the Southern Cook Islands by a wide stretch of the

Pacific Ocean The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the contine ...

, with the nearest part of the Southern chain being

Palmerston Island Palmerston Island is a coral atoll in the Cook Islands in the Pacific Ocean about northwest of Rarotonga. James Cook landed there on 16 June 1774. Overview Palmerston Island is one of a number of sandy islets on a continuous ring of coral ...

, due south of Suwarrow. With an area of just 21 sq. km. and a population of 1,041 (according to the 2016 census), the islands only account for some 6% of the Cooks' population and 9% of the land area. Almost all of this population is on the three islands of Pukapuka, Manihiki, and Penrhyn. The two chains are also geographically different: although both chains are formed from coral atolls which grew around volcanoes, the northern islands are far older, and the volcanic cones have sunk. As such, the northern chain is much lower lying than the southern chain.Wheeler & Keller, p. 20. The two island chains are also parts of different marine ecoregions, with the Northern Cooks regarded as Central Polynesian and the Southern Cooks as Eastern Polynesian. Similarly, the land

ecoregion An ecoregion (ecological region) or ecozone (ecological zone) is an ecologically and geographically defined area that is smaller than a bioregion, which in turn is smaller than a biogeographic realm. Ecoregions cover relatively large areas o ...

in the Northern Cooks is Central Polynesian tropical moist forest whereas that of the southern chain is Cook Islands tropical moist forest.

History

The islands were settled by

Polynesians Polynesians form an ethnolinguistic group of closely related people who are native to Polynesia (islands in the Polynesian Triangle), an expansive region of Oceania in the Pacific Ocean. They trace their early prehistoric origins to Island Sou ...

for several centuries before the first European visitors, Spanish explorer Alvaro de Mendana, navigator Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, and their crew reached and named the island of San Bernardo in 1595, now widely believed to have been Pukapuka.Wheeler & Keller, p. 180. De Quiros returned to the region in 1606 in charge of his own vessel, making landfall at Rakahanga.Wheeler & Keller, p. 176–177. The population of the chain was decimated by

blackbirding Blackbirding involves the coercion of people through deception or kidnapping to work as slaves or poorly paid labourers in countries distant from their native land. The term has been most commonly applied to the large-scale taking of people i ...

during the 19th century, with the island of Tongareva (now more widely known as Penrhyn) being almost completely depopulated. At the end of the century, the chain became part of the Cook Islands Protectorate before the entire protectorate was annexed to

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 List of islands of New Zealand, smaller islands. It is the ...

in 1900. From the 1850s until 1980, the United States laid claim to much of the northern chain under the Guano Islands Act. Despite this, the United States military acknowledged New Zealand sovereignty during World War II operations. The Cook Islands became a self-governing

island nation An island country, island state or an island nation is a country whose primary territory consists of one or more islands or parts of islands. Approximately 25% of all independent countries are island countries. Island countries are historically ...

in free association with New Zealand in 1965, and the US relinquished any last claims to the islands when it signed the 1980 Cook Islands–United States Maritime Boundary Treaty.

Economy

In general terms, the northern group is the less well economically developed of the two chains, having far less connection with the rest of the world than the southern chain. A compounding factor is the limited economic resources of the islands; though fishing is important to the group, the coral soil is of poor fertility and fresh water is generally in poor supply.Wheeler & Keller, p. 173. The population is in decline, having reduced from over 2000 in the early 1960s. The higher susceptibility of the chain to

tropical cyclone A tropical cyclone is a rapidly rotating storm system characterized by a low-pressure center, a closed low-level atmospheric circulation, strong winds, and a spiral arrangement of thunderstorms that produce heavy rain and squalls. Dep ...

s (and the propensity for greater damage due to its low-lying nature) has also caused considerable hardship, with severe damage being recorded after Cyclone Percy in 2005.Monthly Global Tropical Cyclone Summary: February 2005
" ''www.australiasevereweather.com''. Retrieved 30 September 2021. The vulnerability of the chain to

global warming In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate variability and change, Climate change in a broader sense also includes ...

(for the same reason) has also not encouraged economic development of the islands.

Geography

History

Economy

References

Further reading