Stretching across the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument protects more than 7,000 species—a quarter of them found nowhere else on the planet—in an area of island-dotted ocean spanning more than a million square kilometers. Refuge for this life came in 2006, when US President George W. Bush established the marine protected area (MPA). A decade later, President Barack Obama quadrupled the monument’s size to make it, at the time, the largest protected area in the world.
