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22 Tano‘ Tasi: Land of the Sea The islands of Palau, Yap, and the Marianas are the tips of an immense submerged mountain range along the eastern rim of the Philippine Sea. This range stretches over 1,400 miles in a great bend from Halmahera Island in the Moluccas of Indonesia northeastward to the Marianas. From the Marianas , the range turns north and disappears before reappearing above the ocean as the tiny Volcano and Bonin Islands. Within this mountain range, the Marianas are high islands of comparatively recent volcanic origin in the long span of earth’s geological time. They are not located over a volcanic hot spot, as is Hawai‘i, but are on the eastern edge of the Pacific Northwest tectonic plate in a subduction zone along the rim of the Philippine Sea. The slow, grinding subduction of the Pacific Northwest tectonic plate under the smaller Philippine plate to the west causes volcanism from the Marianas north through the Bonins to Japan. Owing to this subduction, Guam and the other Marianas emerged from the ocean, subsided, and reemerged an unknown number of times, beginning in the early Cenozoic era. This makes the current surface of Guam fairly young geologically. The interaction of the tectonic plates causes many volcanic tremors in the Marianas, with a severely destructive earthquake striking Guam about once a century over the past 300 years. Volcanic eruptions still occur every few years in the far northern islands of the Marianas, principally on Pagan. The first life in the Marianas undoubtedly came from the sea, such as calcareous algae, coral, polyps , mollusks, and crustaceans, which created layers of limestone and reef shelves over millions of years. Subsequently, beginning at least in the Pleistocene epoch over 10,000 years before the present (B.P.), living organisms other than sea life appeared in the Marianas. During June and July into August of each of those thousands of years, birds, insects, and other wind-borne organisms arrived, primarily from out of Southeast Asia. These organisms had started to evolve when Indonesia and the Philippines were still part of the Asian mainland, and were occasionally carried away by the southwest monsoons and swept across the Philippine Sea in a northeasterly direction. Among the common Pacific seabirds that made the Marianas their permanent home are the brown booby or gannet, the dark noddy tern, and the beautiful, pure white fairy tern. These all still fly from Guam’s shores to fish miles out to sea, with the tiny fairy terns, usually in pairs, sure signals of fish when the birds wheel and dive from on high as if in aerial dances of delight. Migratory birds from Australia and other land masses followed flight patterns over the Marianas CHAPTER 2 The Place of Before Time Ancestors 1638–1662 The Place of Before Time Ancestors 1638–1662 23 to the northern Pacific regions. Birds in turn carried seeds they had consumed, depositing some in their droppings on islands in Micronesia. Tiny seeds, pollen , and spores in the Indonesia-Philippines nexus may also have been carried by convection wind currents and storms up to higher altitudes. There the antitrade winds wafted the living organic particles along with dust eastward in the upper atmosphere of the western Pacific, and some drifted down and landed on the islands of Micronesia. Oceanic currents out of Indonesia flow parts of the year as a southwest monsoon toward the north and northeast, carrying water-borne life, notably seeds and swimming animals such as turtles, into western Micronesia. Another oceanic current flows from the northern Philippines generally northward and then eastward into the northern islands of the Marianas, occasionally carrying coconuts, logs, and vegetation rafts with small reptiles and terrestrial invertebrates, mangrove seedlings and other plants, insects, and tiny rodents such as shrews and bats. Combined, the June–July–August southwest monsoon and the oceanic currents dispersed life forms northeastward and eastward out of the Indonesia-Philippines nexus each year for thousands and thousands of years. Most of those ancient animal and plant travelers perished, but enough—just a few were sufficient out of millions—landed in Palau, Yap, and the Marianas to initiate living communities. Thus, no island was ever a unique biosphere separate from other ecosystems ; all were linked by living organisms despite vast distances between them. The first humans to enter Micronesia also came mainly out of Southeast Asia; they were proto-Austronesians . By the time they moved beyond what are today northern Indonesia and the southern...

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