Showing posts with label Pacific Ocean. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pacific Ocean. Show all posts

November 4 – Citizenship Day in the Northern Marianas

Posted on November 4, 2017

On this day in 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill and - whoosh! - in a moment, tens of thousands of people became U.S. citizens.


(Did you know that the people of the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas were American citizens?)

Before World War II, these 15 Pacific islands were colonized or occupied by Spain, Germany, and Japan. After WWII, they and several other nearby island chains became a "United Nations Trust Territory of Pacific islands," administered by the United States. Some of these islands later became territories of the U.S., or sovereign states "in free association with" the U.S., but only the Northern Marianas became a "Commonwealth in political union with" the U.S.

I get the impression that most Northern Mariana Islanders like having American passports and close ties with the superpower that is the United States. I imagine some people want even more independence from the U.S., but I haven't seen evidence of that.

Check out the location, geography, and culture of this Commonwealth:









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May 17 – Constitution Day in Nauru

Posted on May 17, 2017


Recently, we discussed the small nation (small in land area and population - it's not small in "scattered over the surface of the Earth" measurements!) of the Federated States of Micronesia, which celebrated its Constitution Day.

Well, not all of the islands of Micronesia are gathered into that nation. Some examples of other Micronesian nations are Palau and Kiribati and today's constitution-celebrant, Nauru.

This island nation is waaayy small. It's just one island, with about 21 square km (8 square miles) in area. The island is surrounded by a coral reef - so much so that there is no good seaport on the island. (There are a few breaks in the reef that allow small boats to approach the island.)

Nauru is a phosphate rock island. Phosphate is useful in fertilizers and to make supplements in animal feed; phosphorous is also used in certain chemical industries. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, with the strip-mining of phosphates going full-tilt, Nauru was the wealthiest nation, per person, in the world.

Old cantilevers are rusting in the ocean
surrounding Nauru, part of the phosphate
mining-and-export operations of the past.
But now most of Nauru's phosphates are gone. The wealth is mostly gone, too. 

And the ugly mining operations devastated 80% of the land and killed off about 40% of the marine life! 

In its need for some source of income, Nauru has become a tax haven and money-laundering center. Also, Nauru has accepted money from the Australian government to host refugees and asylum-seekers in the Nauru Regional Processing Center. I am sad to report that the conditions there are horrific, and there have been riots, hunger-strikes, and human rights violations.  

The pinnacles in the water make for an unusual and quite lovely
beach...but it makes ENJOYING the beach and ocean unsafe. 

During World War II, Japan took over Nauru, and there is
still wreckage left from the war. Here you see artillery that was
used to shoot down Allied airplanes.


  

Also on this date:





















Galician Literature Day














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November 28, 2009

Magellan reaches (and names!) the Pacific Ocean (1520)

In 1519 Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese explorer, launched an expedition that ended up being the first to sail around the world. Although he himself was killed before the expedition returned to Spain in 1522 and 1525 (in two different ships), Magellan had in an earlier voyage sailed eastward from Europe as far as the Malay Peninsula; between the two voyages, he could be said to have sailed all around the world.

On this date in 1520, Magellan's was the first European expedition to reach the Pacific Ocean through straits at the southern tip of South America. Magellan named the Pacific Ocean “peaceful” because, when he first entered the waters from the treacherous straits, the ocean seemed still and calm. Magellan also lived long enough to be credited with leading the first European expedition to cross the Pacific. He died in the Philippines in 1521.

So...What's a “strait”?

A strait is a narrow channel of water that connects two larger bodies of water. Note that the entire idea of a strait is that ships can navigate through it, so a really shallow bit of water between two land masses would not be called a strait. Magellan did not, of course, have a map of much of the area he explored. When he carefully sailed through the Strait of Magellan—a journey that took almost a month—he was looking for a safe passage through unknown waters.


This map was created by Battista Agnese in 1544, probably based on the descriptions and maps made by survivors of Magellan's expedition. Notice that there is no clear indication of where the land masses end—because the explorers didn't know. Were the cliffs and lands they saw parts of continents, peninsulas, islands?

This modern map shows the reality of the situation. We are lucky enough to have explored the world pretty thoroughly, not just by land and sea, but also by air. We even have satellite images!

More maps: Looking at old maps of the Strait of Magellan, we can see a progression of knowledge gained from further exploration.





Match these famous straits to their descriptions:
1. Strait of Gibraltar
2. Bering Strait
3. Dire Straits
A. between Alaska and Siberia, connecting the Arctic and Pacific Oceans
B. between Spain and Africa, connecting the Atlantic and the Mediterranean
C. British rock band between stadium rock and punk rock, connecting the 70s to the 90s


ANSWERS: 1.B 2.A 3.C


Names...names...names...

All through history, names of things and creatures and places and even people change, which makes names very tricky things. One reason for this trickiness is that there are a lot of different languages in the world, so different peoples have different names for the same food, say, or animal.

Or ocean! We can be downright certain, when we hear that Ferdinand Magellan named the Pacific Ocean in 1520, that many, many other names for the same ocean existed, and continue to exist, in the many different native cultures and languages of the world. For example, Japanese used to call the Pacific Ocean Tokai, which means “East Sea” (because the Pacific borders the eastern coast of Japan, of course), and the Maori natives of New Zealand called it Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, or “the great sea of Kiwa.”

Magellan's name is attached to the strait that he used to cross from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but he himself gave it another name: All Saint's Straits. This name commemorated the fact that the expedition entered the strait on November 1, All Saints' Day.

Magellan's name is also given to a kind of penguin (the Magellanic Penguin) that lives in South America and to two small, irregular galaxies (the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds) that can be seen from the Southern Hemisphere. More recently, the Magellan probe mapped the planet Venus in the 1990s, and there is a GPS unit named Magellan.

Finally, we know Magellan (and honor him by naming things) by the English version of his name rather than his actual name. He was born Fernão de Magalhães, in Portugal, and when he renounced Portugal and became a Spaniard, he became Hernando de Magallanes.
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