About Palmyra Atoll

Palmyra Atoll is unlike any other U.S. minor territory in two fundamental ways. First, it is incorporated — the full U.S. Constitution applies here, a distinction shared with no other minor outlying island and only a handful of other American places. Second, it is green. While Baker, Howland, Jarvis, and the others are sun-baked expanses of coral rubble and scrub, Palmyra is blanketed in dense tropical forest. From the air it looks like a jungle dropped into the middle of the Pacific.

Sitting about 1,050 miles south of Honolulu, the atoll consists of roughly 50 small islets arranged on three reef segments enclosing a large lagoon. Its incorporated status traces back to 1862, when King Kamehameha IV of the Kingdom of Hawaii annexed it. When Hawaii became a U.S. territory in 1900, Palmyra came along — and when Hawaii became a state in 1959, Palmyra was deliberately left out, leaving it as an incorporated federal territory with no state affiliation.

Today Palmyra is jointly managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and The Nature Conservancy, which purchased the privately owned portions in 2000 for $30 million. It hosts one of the most active research stations in the remote Pacific, and its reefs and forests are considered benchmark ecosystems for understanding what the pre-human Pacific looked like.

Palmyra Atoll vs. a U.S. State