The Japanese administered the island under the South Seas Mandate, but mostly left affairs in hands of traditional local leaders until the start of World War II. With the rest of the Marshalls, Enewetak was captured by the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1914, during World War I and mandated to the Empire of Japan by the League of Nations in 1920. It was visited by about a dozen ships before the establishment of the German colony of the Marshall Islands in 1885. In 1794, sailors aboard the British merchant sloop Walpole called the islands 'Brown's Range' (thus, the Japanese name 'Brown Atoll'). He called the island ' Los Jardines' (The Gardens). The first European colonizers to Enewetak, Spanish explorer Álvaro de Saavedra Cerón, arrived on 10 October 1529. The islands were first settled by Austronesian islanders. Humans have inhabited the atoll since about 1,000 B.C. Įnewetak has a mean elevation above sea level of 3 metres (9.8 ft). It is made of basalt, and its depth is due to a general subsidence of the entire region and not because of erosion. This seamount is now about 1,400 metres (4,600 ft) below sea level.

The seamount was formed in the late Cretaceous. government referred to the atoll as 'Eniwetok' until 1974, when it changed its official spelling to 'Enewetak' (along with many other Marshall Islands place names, to more properly reflect their pronunciation by the Marshall Islanders ).Įnewetak Atoll formed atop a seamount. The Runit Dome is deteriorating and could be breached by a typhoon, though the sediments in the lagoon are even more radioactive than those which are contained. Nuclear testing by the US totaling the equivalent of over 30 megatons of TNT took place during the cold war in 1977–1980, a concrete dome (the Runit Dome) was built on Runit Island to deposit radioactive soil and debris. It was held by the Japanese from 1914 until its capture by the United States in February 1944, during World War II. It is the second-westernmost atoll of the Ralik Chain and is 305 kilometres (190 mi) west from Bikini Atoll. With a land area total less than 5.85 square kilometres (2.26 sq mi), it is no higher than 5 meters (16.4 ft) and surrounds a deep central lagoon, 80 kilometres (50 mi) in circumference. Enewetak Atoll ( / ɛ ˈ n iː w ə ˌ t ɔː k, ˌ ɛ n ɪ ˈ w iː t ɔː k/ also spelled Eniwetok Atoll or sometimes Eniewetok Marshallese: Ānewetak,, or Āne-wātak, known to the Japanese as Brown Atoll or Brown Island Japanese: ブラウン環礁) is a large coral atoll of 40 islands in the Pacific Ocean and with its 664 people (as of 2011) forms a legislative district of the Ralik Chain of the Marshall Islands.

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