Other entrapment hazards lurk, including old buildings that are falling apart and concrete structures that are cracking open. Animals swim, fly or crawl through cuts or holes, and are often unable to escape. Almost 80 years of storms have now rusted and wracked it into jagged spires and open holes, so that portions look like a witch’s fingers or like Swiss cheese. That sea wall became an enormous hazard for the island’s wildlife. It built the island into the form of an aircraft carrier, dredging more than 55,000 dump trucks’ worth of coral from the shallows, flattening it into a runway about a half-mile long and 350 feet wide, rimming most of it with a sea wall. But in the 1940s, the Navy turned Tern into a pit stop for planes flying between Hawaii and Midway Atoll. Like other islands in the area, Tern used to shape-shift with the storms and tides, and birds, seals and turtles easily moved around its sloping shores. The monument’s 583,000 square miles are filled with reefs and atolls, and Tern Island is at the northern edge of an atoll called Lalo, which has a crescent-shaped reef with a curve of about 20 miles. The two scientists were at the heart of the largest protected area in the United States, Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in Northwestern Hawaii. She couldn’t back up, and she’d flailed her flippers so hard trying to move forward that the rusting steel had scratched the sides of her carapace. Her front end had made it through, but the widest part of her shell got wedged in. She had crawled onto the island the night before to nest and wandered into a hole in a metal wall, likely on her way back to the water. In May of 2021, Brittany Clemans and Lindsey Bull, two sea turtle biologists in their 20s, were walking around Tern Island, an incredibly remote block of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, when they came across a Hawaiian green sea turtle.
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