18 NOVEMBER 2015
The amount of water is incomprehensible. We’ve been flying for hours, and just when we’re about as far from a landmass as you can possibly get—a spot where the curving, wave-flecked Pacific Ocean stretches thousands of kilometers in every direction—an island slides into view. It’s no more than a snippet of sand and palm trees, a snake winding through the blue plain of the Pacific. Fanning out around it are 1,200 similar islands, some inhabited, others not, arranged into a constellation of 29 atolls like stars in a universe of ocean. For every square kilometer of land in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, there are 10,732 square kilometers of ocean.
Source: Hakai Magazine