Home › States & Territories › Minor Outlying Islands
Baker Island
A tiny equatorial island in the last time zone on Earth
Baker Island is a flat coral island of less than one square mile, sitting just north of the equator in the central Pacific about 1,700 nautical miles southwest of Honolulu. Claimed under the Guano Islands Act of 1856 and mined for guano in the 19th century, it is one of only two places, with nearby Howland Island, assigned to UTC−12, the last time zone on Earth, where each calendar day finally ends.
In 1935, young men from Hawaii, many of them students at the Kamehameha Schools, were landed on Baker as colonists to strengthen the American claim, part of a project known as Hui Panalāʻau. World War II ended the colony, and the military briefly used the island as an airfield. Baker has been a national wildlife refuge since 1974, protecting seabirds and surrounding reefs, and is now uninhabited.