Midway Islands | water, nature conservation park / area, atoll

 water, nature conservation park / area, atoll

www.hawaiianatolls.org/about/midway.php

Midway Atoll (also known as Midway Island or Midway Islands, Hawaiian: Pihemanu) is a 6.2 square kilometer atoll located in the North Pacific Ocean (near the northwestern end of the Hawaiian archipelago) at 28°13′N 177°22′W, about one-third of the way between Honolulu and Tokyo. It is less than 150 miles east of the International Date Line, about 2,800 miles west of San Francisco and 2,200 miles east of Japan. It consists of a ring-shaped barrier reef and several sand islets. The two significant pieces of land, Sand Island and Eastern Island, provide habitat for hundreds of thousands of seabirds. It is protected as the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge and Battle of Midway National Memorial, administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The atoll, which has a tiny population (40 in 2004, but no indigenous inhabitants), is an unincorporated territory of the United States, part of the United States Minor Outlying Islands, designated an insular area under the authority of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Midway, as its name suggests, lies nearly halfway between North America and Asia. It also lies almost halfway around the earth from Greenwich, England.

Midway is best known as the location of the Battle of Midway, fought in World War II on June 4, 1942. Two severely outnumbered United States Navy carrier task forces defeated a massive Japanese attack against Midway, marking a turning point in the war in the Pacific theater.