Midway Atoll

• 1. Introduction

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  Midway Atoll sits almost exactly halfway around the world from Greenwich, England, and roughly equidistant between North America and Asia. It is a 2.4 square mile ring of coral and sand in the North Pacific Ocean, home today to around 50 people and millions of seabirds. Yet this tiny, remote place has a peculiar way of turning up at the center of history. How did a dot of coral become the site of a coaling scheme, a luxury flying boat route, a pivotal naval battle, a Cold War listening post, and one of the world's most consequential wildlife refuges? The answers reach back to the mid-19th century, wind through every major American conflict of the 20th, and extend into an uncertain future shaped by plastic and rising seas.

• 2. A Territory Apart

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  Captain N.C. Brooks of the sealing ship Gambia first sighted the atoll on the 5th of July, 1859, and named it the "Middlebrook Islands". He claimed it under the Guano Islands Act of 1856, which authorized Americans to occupy uninhabited islands temporarily to extract bird droppings used as fertilizer. There is no record that anyone ever mined guano there. Eight years later, on the 28th of August, 1867, Captain William Reynolds formally took possession of the atoll for the United States, and the name shifted to "Midway" sometime after that visit.

  Midway's legal identity has always been one step removed from every category that might contain it. It sits near the northwestern end of the Hawaiian Archipelago, 1,310 miles northwest of Honolulu. Yet the Hawaiian Organic Act of 1900 defined Hawaii as the islands acquired through the Newlands Resolution of 1898, and Midway was assumed to have been independently acquired when Reynolds visited in 1867. The Hawaii Admission Act of 1959 settled the matter explicitly, naming Midway among the territories specifically excluded from the new state, alongside Palmyra Island, Johnston Island, and Kingman Reef.

  Midway also keeps its own clock. Unlike every other island in the Hawaiian Archipelago, it observes Samoa Time at UTC-11:00, placing it one hour behind Hawaii. For census purposes it is grouped with the United States Minor Outlying Islands. These are not technicalities; they reflect how profoundly isolated Midway remains, about 2,800 nautical miles from San Francisco and 2,200 nautical miles from Tokyo.

• 3. Coral Over Ancient Fire

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  Roughly 28 million years ago, the seabed beneath Midway drifted over the same volcanic hotspot that is currently building the Island of Hawaii. A shield volcano rose from the ocean floor, possibly reaching a size comparable to the island of Lanai. Its own mass slowly pushed the crust downward in a process called isostatic adjustment, and the island began to sink.

  As the volcano subsided over millions of years, a coral reef kept pace by growing upward toward the light. That reef is now over 516 feet thick in places, and in the lagoon more than 1,261 feet deep, composed mostly of post-Miocene limestones with older Tertiary sediments and basalts at the base. What remains above water is a shallow atoll about 6 miles across: a ring-shaped barrier reef nearly 5 miles in diameter, enclosing Midway Lagoon and the two main islands of Sand Island and Eastern Island. A narrow strip of reef called Spit Island completes the rough circle.

  Midway is the second most northerly atoll in the world, trailing only Kure Atoll, which lies immediately to its northwest along the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain. Sand Island, at 1,117 acres, is the larger of the two main islands and the only one that is inhabited. Eastern Island covers 336 acres and has been uninhabited since U.S. forces cleared its facilities after World War II.

• 4. Failed Colonies, Planted Roots

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  The first attempt to settle Midway began in 1870, when the Pacific Mail Steamship Company secured Congressional funding to blast and dredge a ship channel through the reef. The goal was a mid-ocean coaling station that could help American ships avoid steep taxes at ports controlled by the Kingdom of Hawaii. The project failed. The workers were evacuated in October 1870, and the ship assigned to the operation ran aground on the 21st of October at Kure Atoll, stranding 93 men.

  On the 18th of November, five men set out in a small boat to find help. On the 19th of December, four of them died when the boat capsized in the surf off Kauai. The one survivor reached the U.S. Consulate in Honolulu on Christmas Eve. Relief ships were sent and reached Kure Atoll on the 4th of January, 1871. The survivors of the wreck reached Honolulu on the 14th of January, 1871.

  Thirty-three years later, workers for the Commercial Pacific Cable Company arrived to help lay a trans-Pacific telegraph cable and transformed the island's ecology in the process. To make the place more livable, they planted canary birds, cycads, Norfolk Island pines, ironwood trees, coconut palms, and various deciduous trees. They also brought in about 9,000 short tons of soil from Oahu and Guam. Ants, cockroaches, termites, centipedes, and countless other organisms arrived uninvited in that soil, and the atoll has carried them ever since. On the 20th of January, 1903, the U.S. Navy opened a radio station after cable company workers complained about Japanese squatters and poachers. Between 1904 and 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt stationed 21 Marines on the island to stop the destruction of bird life and secure the cable station.

• 5. The Clipper Route

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  In 1935, Midway entered a brief, glamorous chapter when Pan American Airlines began operating Martin M-130 flying boats on the route from San Francisco to the Republic of China. The M-130s island-hopped across the Pacific, and Midway served as a stepping stone between Honolulu and Wake Island. The route was the fastest and most luxurious way to reach the Far East, though only the very wealthy could afford it. In the 1930s, the fare cost more than three times the annual salary of an average American.

  When the flying boats touched down at Midway, they taxied to a float offshore in the lagoon, and passengers transferred to the Pan Am Hotel or to the "Gooneyville Lodge". That name was borrowed from the albatrosses that colonized the atoll in vast numbers; sailors called them "Gooney birds". The Laysan albatross and black-footed albatross were so ubiquitous that a Navy dental officer later carved a 30-foot mahogany log into an 11-foot statue as a personal tribute to them. That Gooney monument stood for 40 years before termites brought it down; it was replaced with a mock egg after its removal.

  Pan Am's flying boats continued using Midway until 1941. The atoll's role as a refueling stop placed it at the center of the Pacific commercial air network, a position that was about to take on an entirely different kind of importance.

• 6. The Battle That Changed the Pacific

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  Beginning in 1940, as relations with Japan deteriorated, American military planners ranked Midway second only to Pearl Harbor in its importance to the defense of the U.S. West Coast. Airstrips, gun emplacements, and a seaplane base were built quickly. On the 14th of February, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8682 establishing the Midway Island Naval Defensive Sea Area and the Midway Island Naval Airspace Reservation, restricting access to the waters and sky around the atoll to authorized U.S. government vessels and aircraft.

  Japanese forces wasted no time testing that perimeter. Two destroyers shelled Midway on the 7th of December, 1941, the same day they struck Pearl Harbor. A Japanese submarine struck again on the 10th of February, 1942. In total, Midway was attacked four times in those first months of the war.

  Then came the 4th of June, 1942. Aircraft from Henderson Field on Eastern Island joined the U.S. Navy's carrier fleet in confronting a large Japanese strike force. By the end of the three-day battle, four Japanese fleet aircraft carriers had been sunk, along with hundreds of aircraft representing losses the Empire of Japan could never replace. The U.S. lost its own carrier and a number of land- and carrier-based aircraft in the fight. The Battle of Midway is widely regarded as the moment when Japan's control of the Pacific Ocean began to unravel. After the battle, Sand Island itself was expanded through landfill to accommodate a second airfield, more than doubling the island's size in the process.

• 7. Cold War Ears

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  From the 1st of July, 1954 to February 1971, Eastern Island hosted the Naval Security Group Activity, which operated the AN/GRD-6 High-Frequency Direction Finding system. That system automatically tracked the azimuth of incoming radio signals across a frequency range of 2 to 32 megahertz, using two antenna arrays, each consisting of multiple monopole antennas arranged in a circle around a central sense antenna. Beneath each array, a circular copper wire mesh ground mat was buried to ensure consistent readings regardless of local ground conductivity. The system served both the Eastern and Western Pacific direction-finding networks, giving the Navy a broad picture of high-frequency radio traffic across the ocean.

  A separate Cold War mission operated from a shore terminal on the atoll as part of the Sound Surveillance System, known as SOSUS. Using the Low-Frequency Analyzer and Recorder, this facility tracked Soviet submarines. It became operational in 1968, was formally commissioned on the 13th of January, 1969, and remained secret until its decommissioning on the 30th of September, 1983. Before shutting down, the facility transferred its data first to Naval Facility Barbers Point in Hawaii in 1981, then directly to the Naval Ocean Processing Facility at Ford Island, Hawaii.

  From 1958 through 1960, Midway also hosted a terminal of the Missile Impact Location System, which tracked the splashdown points of test missile nose cones during intercontinental ballistic missile tests in the Pacific. In June 1969, President Richard Nixon met South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu at Midway House to discuss the Vietnam War, with around 3,500 people then living on Sand Island to support U.S. military operations.

• 8. Wildlife Refuge, Plastic Tide

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  On the 28th of May, 1987, the World War II facilities on Sand and Eastern Islands were listed on the National Register of Historic Places and simultaneously named a National Historic Landmark. The Navy downgraded Midway to a Naval Air Facility in 1978, and the base closed operationally on the 10th of September, 1993. On the 31st of October, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 13022, transferring jurisdiction to the Department of the Interior. The last Navy personnel left on the 30th of June, 1997. On the 13th of September, 2000, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt formally designated the refuge as the Battle of Midway National Memorial.

  Midway today shelters 67 to 70 percent of the world's Laysan albatross population and 34 to 39 percent of all black-footed albatrosses on Earth. In 2007-08, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service translocated 42 endangered Laysan ducks to the atoll. A resident pod of 300 spinner dolphins lives in the lagoon. Critically endangered Hawaiian monk seals raise pups on the beaches. Of the roughly 200 plant species on the atoll, 75 percent are non-native introductions, a legacy of the cable company workers in 1903.

  The atoll's greatest ongoing threat, however, is plastic. About 20 tons of marine debris from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch accumulate on Midway's beaches every year. Of the estimated 1.5 million Laysan albatrosses that breed on Midway each winter, nearly all carry plastic in their digestive systems. Parents mistake brightly colored plastic fragments for squid and fish and feed them to their chicks. Because albatross chicks cannot regurgitate until they are four months old, roughly one-third of them die. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates at least 100 pounds of plastic wash onto the atoll every week, and a single albatross can have up to 50 percent of its intestinal tract filled with the material. A U.S. Geological Survey study has warned that Midway and similar Pacific islands could become inundated and uninhabitable during the 21st century as storm waves intensify and sea levels rise, placing the very reef that formed over 28 million years of geological history at risk of disappearing beneath the surface.