50 Fun Facts About Marshall Islands

The Marshall Islands lie in which ocean?

The Pacific: the islands lie about halfway between Hawaii and Australia, so far from shipping lanes and big populations that the United States chose them in 1946 to test its nuclear weapons.

What is the capital and largest city of the Marshall Islands?

Majuro: its centre, Delap-Uliga-Djarrit, is named for three separate islets that were joined by landfill into one strip of town, and about half the country now lives on the atoll.

The Marshall Islands' land area roughly matches which city's?

Washington, D.C.: the 29 atolls and five islands hold only about 181 square kilometres of dry land, yet they are scattered across an expanse of ocean thousands of times larger.

What are the Marshall Islands' two parallel island chains called?

Ratak and Ralik: Ratak, the eastern chain, sees the dawn first and means 'sunrise', while Ralik, the western chain, means 'sunset'.

Which company first reached orbit in 2008, launching from a tiny islet in the Marshall Islands after three failures?

SpaceX was close to bankruptcy after three failures when its fourth Falcon 1 finally reached orbit from Omelek, an islet inside a US Army missile range.

Like the Marshall Islands, which Indian Ocean nation of coral atolls is the world's lowest-lying country?

The Maldives: in 2009 its president held a cabinet meeting underwater to show what rising seas would do to a country of low coral islands, a threat the Marshall Islands share.

What is the average elevation of the Marshall Islands above sea level?

About 2 metres: each atoll is a cap of coral and sand resting on the rim of a long-sunken volcano, so the land never rises far above the reef it grew on.

Which atoll, the largest in the Marshall Islands, hosts the US Army's missile-testing range?

Kwajalein: the Army leases much of the atoll, so most Marshallese who work on the base commute by boat from nearby Ebeye, one of the most densely populated islands in the region.

The Marshall Islands are named after a sea captain of which nationality?

British: Captain John Marshall sailed through in 1788 in the Scarborough, fresh from landing convicts in New South Wales with the First Fleet, and charted the islands on his way to China.

Which European power's ships were the first to sight the Marshall Islands, in the 1520s?

Spain: its navigators crossed the islands on voyages to and from the Spice Islands but found no wealth worth exploiting, so the atolls went largely unmapped for more than 250 years.

In 2014 castaway José Salvador Alvarenga washed ashore in the Marshall Islands after more than a year adrift from which country?

Mexico: he set out on a fishing trip from Chiapas in late 2012, was blown out to sea in a storm, and lived on raw fish, birds, turtles and rainwater until his boat reached Ebon Atoll.

Marshallese navigators built stick charts to map what?

Marshallese stick charts mapped ocean swell patterns, showing with lashed palm ribs and shells how swells bend and cross around atolls; navigators memorised them and left them ashore.

Traditional Marshallese sailing canoes, called walaps, were built from the wood of which tree?

Breadfruit wood made the hull and outrigger, and builders bound the timbers together with coconut-fibre rope; the largest walaps could carry dozens of people between atolls.

Who sits on the Marshall Islands' advisory Council of Iroij?

Traditional chiefs: iroij families held such sway that the country did not have a commoner as president until 2000, when Kessai Note took office.

Which empire made the Marshall Islands a protectorate in the 1880s?

Germany: its trading firms already dominated the islands' commerce, and Berlin left much of the running of its new protectorate to those companies, based on Jaluit Atoll.

Which product drove the Marshall Islands' colonial economy in the 19th century?

Copra, the dried flesh of coconuts pressed for oil, became the South Seas' great trade good in the 1860s; in the Marshalls the firms that bought it grew powerful enough to be left running much of the colony.

Which country seized the Marshall Islands in 1914 and later ran them as a League of Nations mandate?

Japan took the islands within weeks of entering the First World War, held them under the League's mandate, and later built the airfields that US forces fought to capture in 1944.

Olympic runner Louis Zamperini reached the Marshall Islands in 1943 after 47 days adrift on a raft; which bestseller tells his story?

Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand, tells how Zamperini survived a strafing bomber and weeks of thirst on the raft, only to be captured as he reached land and held prisoner for more than two years.

The Marshall Islands sued nine nuclear powers in which court?

The International Court of Justice could hear only three of the nine cases, filed in 2014, because the other six states reject its jurisdiction, and in 2016 it threw those out as well.

Bikini hosted the famous tests, but which other Marshallese atoll saw the first hydrogen bomb, 'Mike', explode in 1952?

Enewetak: the blast erased the islet of Elugelab and left a crater almost two kilometres wide; the device, fuelled with supercooled liquid deuterium, was far too bulky to be dropped as a weapon.

Fallout from the 1954 Castle Bravo test on a fishing crew helped inspire which movie monster, released that year?

Godzilla opens with the monster destroying a ship, a direct reference to the real trawler caught in Bravo's fallout months earlier; the 15-megaton blast was 2.5 times bigger than planned.

Castle Bravo's fallout sickened the crew of a Japanese fishing boat known in English by which name?

Lucky Dragon: ash from the blast fell on all 23 crew, who came home sick, and one died months later; the outcry over contaminated fish back home launched a mass movement against nuclear weapons.

The battleship Nagato, sunk at Bikini in the 1946 nuclear tests, had been the flagship that signalled the start of which attack?

Pearl Harbor: Admiral Yamamoto sent the coded order 'Climb Mount Niitaka' from Nagato; less than five years later the US Navy anchored her among its target ships, and the second bomb sank her.

Shortly before Louis Réard named his 1946 swimsuit after Bikini Atoll, what had rival Jacques Heim called his own tiny two-piece?

The Atome was sold as 'the world's smallest bathing suit', so Réard pitched his bikini as smaller still, and had to hire a casino dancer to model it because no fashion model would wear it.

Bikini Atoll received which international designation in 2010?

UNESCO World Heritage Site: Bikini was listed in 2010 for what the bomb tests left behind, a fleet of warships on the lagoon floor and a crater more than a mile wide in the reef.

What is the Runit Dome?

A concrete cap over radioactive waste: in the late 1970s US troops dumped contaminated soil and debris into a bomb crater on Runit and sealed it under 18 inches of concrete, which locals call the Tomb.

The Marshall Islands' national holiday on 1 May marks which 1979 event?

A new constitution took effect on 1 May 1979 and brought self-government under the country's first president, but full independence came only in 1986, so the national day honours the earlier date.

Which agreement governs the Marshall Islands' relationship with the United States?

The Compact of Free Association, first in force in 1986 and since renewed, gives the United States defence responsibility and funding duties while letting Marshallese live and work in the US without visas.

What currency does the Marshall Islands use?

The US dollar arrived with American rule after the Second World War and stayed when the trusteeship ended, with US grants paying for much of the islands' budget ever since.

What is the name of the Marshall Islands' legislature?

The Nitijela chooses the president from among its own 33 members and can remove one too: in 2016 it voted out a president after only two weeks in office.

Who became the first female president of the Marshall Islands in January 2016?

Hilda Heine, a former education minister, became president on 28 January 2016 after Casten Nemra was ousted by a no-confidence vote two weeks into his term.

Which country joined the UN alongside the Marshall Islands in 1991?

South Korea was admitted with North Korea on 17 September 1991, the day the Marshall Islands took its seat; the Security Council had ended the islands' trusteeship only the year before, clearing the way.

What are the two official languages of the Marshall Islands?

Marshallese and English: nearly everyone speaks Marshallese at home, while English came with four decades of American administration after the Second World War and stayed as a language of government.

Which city has the largest Marshallese community in the mainland United States?

Springdale, Arkansas: islanders can live and work in the US without visas, and since the 1980s thousands have settled there for jobs in its poultry plants; their government even opened a consulate in the town.

In 2011 the Marshall Islands declared two million sq km of ocean the world's largest what?

Shark sanctuary: across waters about the size of Saudi Arabia, commercial shark fishing and the trade in shark products are banned, and any shark caught by accident must be released alive.

In the 2010s the Marshallese capital became one of the world's busiest transshipment ports for which fish?

Tuna: boats that net it far out at sea bring the catch into the capital's sheltered lagoon and pass it to carrier ships bound for canneries, and the licence fees those fleets pay help fund the government.

As of 2025, the world's three biggest ship registries were Liberia, the Marshall Islands and which other country?

Panama: with Liberia and the Marshall Islands it flags about half the world's shipping by tonnage, though the Marshallese registry is run on the islands' behalf by a company based in Virginia.

The star on the Marshall Islands flag has 24 points, one for each of what?

Electoral districts: every one of the 24 gets its own ray, while the four longest rays single out the main cultural centres, so no community is left off the national flag.

Emlain Kabua, designer of the Marshall Islands flag adopted in 1979, was the first person to hold which position there?

First Lady: the wife of the first president drew a design that works as a map, with the rising bands standing for the equator and the star above them for a country lying just north of it.

Besides 'hello' and 'goodbye', what else does the Marshallese greeting 'yokwe' mean?

Love: like Hawaiian 'aloha', the one word covers hello, goodbye and affection, and it is so entrenched that it is still spelt with a 'y', a letter the Marshallese alphabet doesn't have.

The Marshall Islands claims which US-administered territory under the name Ānen Kio?

Wake Island: Marshallese oral tradition tells of voyages to the atoll long before the United States annexed it in 1899, and the islands' claim, which the US government does not recognise, rests on those legends.

The Marshall Islands won five gold medals at the 2023 regional games, all in which sport?

Weightlifting: Mattie Sasser swept all three golds in her class and Mike Riklon took two more, and Sasser went on to carry the country's flag at the Paris Olympics the following summer.

A long-running but unproven theory holds that which vanished aviator came down in the Marshall Islands?

Amelia Earhart: believers say she missed tiny Howland Island in 1937 and came down hundreds of miles away in the Marshalls, citing islanders' stories of an American woman flier, but no proof has been found.

What were Bikini's 167 islanders promised when moved off their atoll in 1946?

A return home after the tests was the promise, but the islanders went hungry on their first refuge, and when families did go back in the 1970s the atoll proved too contaminated to live on.

At the 2015 Paris climate talks, the Marshall Islands led a coalition that pushed which goal into the deal?

A 1.5°C warming limit: foreign minister Tony deBrum, who as a boy of nine had watched a bomb test turn the sky red, rallied rich and poor countries behind the tougher target.

Why did Bikini's coconut palms absorb so much radioactive caesium after the tests?

The coral soil has very little potassium, and plants take up caesium in its place because the two elements behave alike; scientists found that spreading potassium fertiliser cuts the uptake.

What made Castle Bravo two and a half times more powerful than its designers predicted?

Its lithium fuel reacted in a way nobody expected: designers assumed the common isotope lithium-7 was inert, but it bred extra tritium, lifting a planned 6 megatons to 15 and spreading fallout beyond the danger zone.

Which Operation Crossroads shot was detonated underwater in Bikini's lagoon in July 1946?

Baker, fired 27 metres underwater on 25 July 1946, threw up a column of radioactive water that contaminated the target fleet so badly that the planned third shot, Charlie, was cancelled.

As of 2024, the Marshall Islands was one of only twelve states that recognised which government?

Taiwan: the Marshall Islands stayed loyal while Beijing persuaded ten other allies to switch sides in eight years, leaving Taipei with a dozen partners, three of them small island states in Oceania.

In 1954 Castle Bravo's fallout settled on an inhabited atoll as a white powder that islanders likened to what?

Snow: one islander recalled that children played in the ash and ate it, not knowing what it was; nobody was evacuated for two days, by which time many had burns and radiation sickness.