Christmas Island

Christmas Island is a seamount - meaning that it’s an extinct volcano that rose steeply 5,000 metres from the ocean floor, about 60 million years ago. It gradually rose higher over 10 million years. Each time it got higher, coral formed, creating a  limestone cap, and the sea eroded it creating cliffs that you can see everywhere around the island.

There are thirteen small shallow beaches with coral, so the island was extremely difficult to land on, and to populate. It was settled much later than Cocos (Keeling) Islands, by the Clunies-Ross family, because a lot of phosphate had been found here. They planted a coconut plantation and a banana plantation. The British Phosphate company took over the island from the Clunies-Ross family and employed Chinese workers. Phosphate mining is still the major employer today. Most of the phosphate went to Japan in the early 1900s. During the Second World War, the Japanese took over the island, and deported a lot of the Chinese to Singapore (only 16 came back). The European workers had already been evacuated to Singapore, where they arrived shortly before it was taken. In the attack, the phosphate works were machine gunned by air, and the workers tried to disable the plant. The Japanese only succeeded in taking one shipment of phosphate back to Japan during the entire war.

Most of the island is national park, covered in tropical jungle with lots of endemic plants, birds and animals. The jungle and the limestone makes it extremely difficult to travel through, 

 

and telephone reception is only available near the settlement. Every visitor is asked to pick up a PLB from the police station, so they can be found if they get into trouble. Unfortunately, wolf snakes, giant centipedes and yellow crazy ants have recently been introduced into the island, and some of the endemic species are really having trouble surviving.

And here is tonight’s sunset with a sliver of moon.