Papahanaumokuakea and Kure Atoll
Kure Atoll (Moku Pāpapa) lies twelve hundred miles from Honolulu, at the northwestern end of the Hawaiian Archipelago inside Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument. Kure is a small oval-shaped atoll with a land area of 213 acres and reef area of 41,267 acres. The barrier reef is about 15 miles in circumference and 6 miles in greatest diameter. Kure Atoll is bordered all around by sand dunes, which rise steeply from the waters edge to a height of ten to twenty feet above sea level. The dunes and most of the interior are covered with a dense growth of shrub called Beach Scaevola, with glossy green leaves, small white flowers, and small white fruit.
Kure Atoll is a nesting area for shearwaters, petrels, tropicbirds, boobies, frigatebirds, albatrosses, terns, and noddies. It is an important pupping and resting area for Hawaiian Monk Seals, with a population of about 100-125 seals, and Green Sea Turtles are also common on the beaches. Despite its northern location and relatively cool waters, it has a wide diversity of corals and large invertebrates such as echinoderms, crustacea, and mollusks. The waters also support large schools of dolphins, jacks, sharks, goatfish, and chub, as well as dragon morays, knifejaws, cleaner wrasses, masked angelfish, and a rare native grouper called Hapu’upu’u.
Like many locations in the NWHI, Kure is low, inconspicuous, and mostly submerged. In the 1800′s numerous ships ran aground on the reefs at Kure, stranding crews on the atoll for months at a time while they constructed smaller craft to make the long passage back to the main Hawaiian Islands. Two of the known shipwrecks were the USS Saginaw (1870) and the whaleship Parker (1842).
Being the northern-most coral atoll in the world, it lies at a latitude where coral growth occurs at a slower rate than reef destruction, allowing the atoll to sink below the surface with no further possibility of a coral connection. As Kure Atoll continues its slow migration atop the Pacific Plate, it will eventually slip below the surface.
