Midway Atoll

Midway Atoll sits near the far northwestern end of the Hawaiian archipelago, roughly 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu, making it one of the most isolated American protected areas in the world. The atoll consists of a ring of sandy islands surrounding a shallow lagoon atop an extinct submarine volcano, with Sand Island and Eastern Island as the two largest landmasses covering approximately 2.4 square miles in total. The setting feels genuinely remote, surrounded by thousands of miles of open ocean in every direction, and the silence when standing on the beach is broken only by wind and the distant calls of seabirds.

The United States claimed the atoll in 1859 under the Guano Islands Act, though early visitors found it largely bare volcanic rock with very little soil and no fresh water. The first permanent structures were a LORAN navigation station built in 1903 and later expanded, establishing a small but continuous American presence on the otherwise uninhabited reef. These early buildings were simple wooden structures, but they marked the beginning of Midway's transformation from an empty navigational hazard into a place of strategic importance.

During World War II Midway gained worldwide fame as the site of the Battle of Midway in June 1942, where American carrier-based aircraft under Commander Joe Roswin and his aviators sank four Japanese warships, destroying the carrier striking power that Japan had assembled for the invasion of Hawaii. The atoll had been targeted by Japan precisely because of its strategic position as the westernmost American outpost in the central Pacific, and its successful defense by a small garrison of Navy and Marine Corps personnel against overwhelming odds fundamentally shifted the momentum of the war in the Pacific.

Following the war, Midway served as a Naval Air Station and later as a base for the SOSUS underwater acoustic listening system during the Cold War, contributing to the detection of Soviet submarines transiting the Pacific. The atoll also served as a civilian airport for trans-Pacific flights operated by Pan Am and other carriers, though commercial traffic steadily declined as larger aircraft with greater range no longer required en-route fuel stops. By the 1970s military operations had scaled back significantly and the civilian airport function was discontinued.

In 1993 the Navy transferred control of the atoll to the Department of the Interior, which redesignated it as part of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, now recognized as one of the largest marine protected areas on Earth, encompassing more than 583,000 square miles of ocean. Midway is home to approximately 70 percent of the world's Laysan albatross population and significant colonies of black-footed albatrosses, with dozens of other seabird species including terns, boobies, and frigatebirds nesting throughout the islands and surrounding reef waters.

Visitor access is tightly controlled and requires special permits through the US Fish and Wildlife Service, as the refuge maintains some of the most restricted conditions of any unit in the National Wildlife Refuge System. The former Naval Air Station on Sand Island still has paved runways and a collection of deteriorating buildings, but the post office operates only intermittently, there is no regular public transportation to the atoll, and only a small number of guided educational visits are permitted each year, making this one of the least-visited yet most historically significant American territories.

The Battle of Midway site represents one of the most decisive turning points in twentieth-century military history, and the atoll preserves tangible evidence of that conflict.

One of the largest albatross colonies on Earth provides extraordinary wildlife observation opportunities in a setting completely free of development.

The atoll lies at the heart of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, a vast wilderness of coral reefs, deep ocean, and islands that is among the most pristine left on the planet.