Fairway rock
| Fairway rock | ||
|---|---|---|
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| Waters | Bering Strait | |
| Archipelago | Diomedes Islands | |
| Geographical location | 65 ° 37 '26 " N , 168 ° 44' 23" W | |
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| length | 700 m | |
| width | 620 m | |
| surface | 31 ha | |
| Highest elevation | 163 m | |
| Residents | uninhabited | |
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The Fairway Rock is a 308,541 sqm (0.31 km²) large island in the Bering Strait 19 km southeast of the Diomede Islands and 28.5 km to the west of Cape Prince of Wales of Alaska . James Cook was the first European to document the rock on August 8, 1778, which was given its current name in July 1826 by Frederick Beechey , an English naval officer and geographer.
The granite was how the two Diomede Islands, by glacial erosion carved out of the surrounding less resistive rocks. The age of the biotite in the granite was determined to be around 110 million years using the potassium-argon method . The rock towers steeply out of the water and can be seen from the Alaskan coast. The surrounding water depth is about 50 m.
Politically, the island belongs to Alaska and is assigned to the Nome Census Area and Unit 22E of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's Wildlife Conservation . It is part of the Bering Sea Unit of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge .
The island is uninhabited, but is used as a nesting area by sea birds such as the dwarf or crested alf. Native Alaskans came to the rock to collect eggs since prehistoric times.
From 1966 to 1995, the United States Navy had an environmental monitoring facility operated by a radioisotope generator stationed on the island.
Web links
Fairway Rock in the Geographic Names Information System of the United States Geological Survey .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Captain James Cook: The Third Voyage (1776-1780). Captain Cook Society, accessed May 14, 2017 .
- ↑ Frederick William Beechey: Narrative of a voyage to the Pacific and Beering's strait, to co-operate with the polar expeditions: performed in His Majesty's ship Blossom, under the command of Captain FW Beechey, RN, FRS & c. in the years 1825, 26, 27, 28 . tape 1 . Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, London 1831, p. 337 f . (English, online ).
- ^ John Muir : The Cruise of the Corwin. Journal of the Arctic Expedition of 1881 in search of De Long and the Jeannette . Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston / New York 1917, Appendix I: The Glaciation of the Arctic and Subarctic Regions Visited during the Cruise , p. 248 (English, online [PDF; 5.0 MB ]).
- ↑ Alison B. Till, Julie A. Dumoulin, Melanie B. Werdon, Heather A. Bleick: Preliminary bedrock geologic map of the Seward Peninsula, Alaska, and accompanying conodont data . Open-File Report 2009-1254. United States Geological Survey (USGS), September 29, 2010, p. 13 , Kgu: Granitic rocks, undifferentiated (Cretaceous) (English, online [PDF; 3.9 MB ]).