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Micronesia
Two thousand tiny islands scattered over an ocean
Micronesia is a subregion with almost no land in it. Its 2,000-odd islands — the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Nauru, plus the US territories of Guam, the Northern Marianas, and Wake — add up to roughly 3,200 square kilometers, an area smaller than Luxembourg, spread across an expanse of Pacific Ocean bigger than the continental United States. About 540,000 people live on them. Kiribati is the extreme case: 811 square kilometers of land dispersed over 3.5 million square kilometers of sea, straddling both the equator and the international date line.
Most of these islands are coral atolls, low rings of reef enclosing a lagoon, and they rarely rise more than a few meters above the water. That single fact governs everything. The exceptions are volcanic: the Marianas arc, where Agrihan reaches 965 meters, and the high islands of Palau and Pohnpei. Beside the Marianas runs the deepest trench on earth, plunging to nearly 11,000 meters at the Challenger Deep. The reefs are spectacular and the fisheries — skipjack and yellowfin tuna above all — are the region's real wealth, licensed out to distant-water fleets from Asia and America.
The people who settled these islands crossed thousands of kilometers of open ocean by canoe, navigating by stars, swell, and bird flight, and the traditional wayfinding of the Marshallese and Carolinians is one of the great feats of premodern technology. Spain, Germany, Japan, and the United States ruled in turn; Saipan, Peleliu, and Tarawa were killing grounds in the Pacific war, and the US tested 67 nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, permanently displacing the people of Bikini and Enewetak. Sea-level rise is now an existential threat rather than a metaphorical one, and Kiribati and the Marshalls are running out of options.