Caroline Island
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Coordinates: Caroline Island or Caroline Atoll (also known as Millennium Island), is the easternmost of the uninhabited coral atolls which comprise the southern Line Islands in the central Pacific Ocean. First sighted by Europeans in 1606, claimed by the United Kingdom in 1868, and part of the Republic of Kiribati since the island nation's independence in 1979, Caroline Island has remained relatively untouched and is considered one of the world's most pristine tropical islands, despite guano mining, copra harvesting, and human habitation in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is home to one of the world's largest populations of the coconut crab and is an important breeding site for seabirds, most notably the sooty tern. The atoll is best known for its role in celebrations surrounding the arrival of the year 2000— a 1995 realignment of the International Date Line made Caroline Island one of the first points of land on Earth to see sunrise on January 1, 2000.
Caroline Atoll lies near the southeastern end of the Line Islands, a string of atolls extending across the equator some 1500 km (900 miles) south of the Hawaiian Islands in the central Pacific. The slightly crescent-shaped atoll (3.76 km² or 1.45 mi² in land area) consists of 39 separate islets surrounding a narrow lagoon, 8.7 by 1.2 km² in size, or with an area of 6.3 km². The total atoll area, including dry land, lagoon and reef flat, measures 13 by 2.5 km, or 24 km². The islets rise to a height of only 6 meters (20 ft) above sea level. The islets, like those of all atolls, share a common geologic origin and consist of sand deposits and limestone rock set atop a coral reef. Three large islets make up the bulk of Caroline's land area: Nake Islet (1.04 km² or 0.40 mi²) at the north; Long Islet (0.76 km² or 0.29 mi²) at the northeast of the lagoon and South Islet (1.07 km² or 0.41 mi²). The remaining assembly of small islets, most of which were named during the 1988 ecological survey, conducted by Angela and Cameron Kepler, fall into four major groupings: the South Nake Islets, the Central Leeward Islets, the Southern Leeward Islets, and the Windward Islets (see map). Caroline's islets are particularly ephemeral— over the course of a century of observation, several of the smallest islets have been documented to appear or disappear
Geography and climate