Kiritimati holds more dry land than any other coral atoll on Earth — more than seventy percent of Kiribati's entire national territory, gathered into a low ring of scrub, salt flat and coconut grove wrapped around a lagoon of roughly the same size. Captain Cook anchored off it on Christmas Eve in 1777 and named it for the date. A French priest, Emmanuel Rougier, leased the atoll in 1917 and planted half a million coconut palms; the villages that grew around his plantation still carry their improbable names — London, Banana, Poland. The rest of the atoll belongs to the birds. Eighteen seabird species breed here, the whole atoll has been a wildlife sanctuary since 1975, and its sooty terns keep a calendar found almost nowhere else: with no seasons at the equator to cue them, they nest every six months rather than every twelve.
Almost everyone who makes the long flight comes for the flats. At low water the lagoon drains into a shining plain you can wade for hours, and the bonefish and giant trevally that hunt it have seen few enough anglers to be careless. Inland the atoll is quiet to the point of strangeness: grass, leaning palms, a road that simply ends. That quiet hides a violent recent history. Britain exploded hydrogen bombs here in 1957 and 1958, the United States followed with twenty-two detonations in 1962, and nobody moved the islanders out. Across 2015 and 2016 a ten-month marine heatwave — the worst heat stress ever recorded on a reef — killed roughly eighty to ninety percent of the coral around the atoll, and researchers have tracked the survivors' slow return ever since. The fish, the birds and the emptiness remain, and because Kiribati keeps its clocks fourteen hours ahead of Greenwich, the date turns over here before anywhere else on Earth.