Nikumaroro

Template: Infobox Atoll / Maintenance / height Missing

Nikumaroro ( former name: Gardner Iceland, also Motu Oona ) is located in the Pacific atoll. It is the westernmost of the island nation of Kiribati belonging to group the Phoenix Islands.

Geography

The elongated from north to south, 7.5 km long and a maximum of 2.5 km wide atoll consists of a narrow strip of land fringing the central lagoon; the land area is 4.1 km ². Surrounded by a dense is the atoll coral reef, there is a shallow, silted at low tide access to the lagoon from the open sea to the west, is only suitable for boats.

The island is populated by thousands of palm thieves.

History

Nikumaroro in 1824 by Captain C. Kemiss ( other name forms Kemin, Kemish ) discovered by the British whaling ship Eliza Ann. The name comes from Gardner Captain Joshua Coffin II by whalers Ganges from Nantucket, the island wiedersichtete end of 1825.

1856 took over the United States, citing the Guano Islands Act, the area in possession, in order to reduce the local and export guano as a fertilizer in the United States.

On November 29, 1929, the British freighter SS Norwich City stranded with a crew of 35 men during a storm on coral reef in the northwest of the island. In the engine room, a fire broke out, whereupon the crew left the ship; there were 11 people to death. After several days on the island, the survivors were rescued. The wreck is still visible off the coast, but is now broken into two parts.

From 1938, the atoll was populated as part of the Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme. The small settlement on the south side of the western lagoon entrance was Karaka. The lack of drinking water ( on the island there is no source) led to 1963, that the settlement was abandoned.

Since 1979 part of the atoll, now uninhabited, the island nation of Kiribati; from hence the current ( official ) name.

Some aviation historians, the thesis that the American pilot Amelia Earhart crashed in their attempt in 1937 became the first woman to cross in an airplane of the Pacific Ocean, not the Pacific into the sea, but is landed on Gardner Iceland and there still survive some time has. In 2012, an expedition of the organization Tighar set out to dive for the remains of the Lockheed Electra the pilot in the deep sea off the coast of the island.