Howland Island
The Howland Island (English Howland Iceland, [ haʊlənd ] ) is a small island in the Pacific, which is geographically upstream of the Phoenix Islands and politically belongs to the outer areas of the United States. It is a so-called " unincorporated territory" of the United States and is assigned for statistical purposes the United States Minor Outlying Islands.
The island, together with the Baker Island, the only land surface with the time zone UTC -12 ( International Date Line West, IDLW ).
The Howland Island is that the earth's surface, the ( 386 miles) has the smallest distance to Erdgegenpunkt, the intersection of the equator with the 180 ° meridian.
Geography
The Howland Island is located 3061 km southwest of Honolulu, about half way from Hawaii to Australia and is located only 88.7 kilometers north of the equator. From the neighboring Baker Island is 68.3 km away. The Howland Island represents an upscale Atoll and is fully lined with a coral reef. The now uninhabited island has a land area of 1.84 km ² and reaches a height of only 6 meters. There are no natural sources of fresh water.
History
The island said to have been discovered around 1822 by George B. Worth, the captain of the whaler Oeno from Nantucket, who named it Worth Iceland, but this contact is only poorly documented. The first certain discovery is from December 1, 1828 by Captain Daniel McKenzie of the American whaler Minerva Smyth from New Bedford. Another sighting is that of George E. Netcher, the captain of the whaling ship Isabella on 9 September 1842.
On 5 February 1857, the island was taken, citing the Guano Islands Act for the United States in possession and started the guano mining. With the exhaustion of guano deposits in 1890 ended the economic interest in this island.
In 1935, attempts to colonize the Howland Island (as well as the Baker Island and Jarvis Island) under the Baker, Howland and Jarvis Colonization Scheme. These four people from Hawaii were brought to the island by boat Itasca. The small settlement on the west side of the island was named after the ship, namely Itascatown.
The aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart wanted to stop over Howland Island during their circumnavigation of the world by air in 1937, but never arrived there on. She has since been regarded as lost. In 1938 it was built in honor of the Howland Island a lighthouse.
During the Second World War, two of the four colonists were killed in a Japanese air raid on 8 December 1941. The two survivors were evacuated on 31 January 1942 by the U.S. Navy. The settlement was also destroyed and never rebuilt.
Since the early 1980s, the Howland island by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service ( USFWS ), an agency of the Ministry of the Interior of the United States, as Howland Iceland National Wildlife Refuge managed. Trespassing on the island requires a special permit, which is issued only for scientific and educational purposes. The island is visited approximately every two years by the USFWS; the United States Coast Guard patrols at irregular intervals claimed by the United States territorial waters around the island. Amateur radio operators have repeatedly been given permission to spark from the island, on the condition that they have a staff of USFWS took at his own expense to the island, so the high cost of regular visits could be reduced.