What you didn't know about Christmas Island

In this video you can find seven little known facts about Christmas Island. Keep watching and subscribe, as more Australian territories will follow!

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More information about the video content bellow:
1. The Territory of Christmas Island is an Australian external territory comprising the island of the same name. Christmas Island is located in the Indian Ocean, around 350 kilometres (220 mi) south of Java and Sumatra and around 1,550 kilometres (960 mi) north-west of the closest point on the Australian mainland. It has an area of 135 square kilometres.

2. The first European to sight the island was Richard Rowe of the Thomas in 1615. The island was later named on Christmas Day (25 December) 1643 by Captain William Mynors, but only settled in the late 19th century. Its geographic isolation and history of minimal human disturbance has led to a high level of endemism among its flora and fauna, which is of interest to scientists and naturalists. The majority (63 percent) of the island is included in the Christmas Island National Park, which features several areas of primary monsoonal forest.

3. It has been settled only since the 1880s; for much of the period since then it was administered by the Straits Settlement (Singapore), with inclusion as an Australian territory only since 1958. Phosphate mining was the reason for its settlement, and has persisted as the main (sometimes only) industry ever since, leading to loss of about 25% of the Island’s rainforest area.

4. Flying Fish Cove is the capital city and main settlement of Australia's Christmas Island. Although it was originally named after British survey-ship Flying-Fish, many maps simply label it “The Settlement”. It was the first British settlement on the island, established in 1888.

5. Most of its reptiles, native mammals, and terrestrial birds occur (or occurred) nowhere else; and nearly 200 invertebrate species are considered endemic. There are very few areas in Australia (indeed, in the world) that can match such narrow endemism. The endemic Red Crab is the most conspicuous, with a population of at least 40 million. It is the Island’s ecological lynchpin, engineering the forest structure and productivity. It is everywhere; but spectacularly so in its annual breeding migration from forest to sea, when the forest floor, roads and gardens become moving masses of crab: one of the world’s great animal migrations.

6. From the outbreak of the South-East Asian theatre of World War II in December 1941, Christmas Island was a target for Japanese occupation because of its rich phosphate deposits.

7. From the late 1980s and early 1990s, boats carrying asylum seekers, mainly departing from Indonesia, began landing on the island. In 2001, Christmas Island was the site of the Tampa controversy, in which the Australian government stopped a Norwegian ship, MV Tampa, from disembarking 438 rescued asylum-seekers. The ensuing standoff and the associated political reactions in Australia were a major issue in the 2001 Australian federal election.

More Info:
https://theconversation.com/unknown-w...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christm...
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Images:
By DIAC images - Christmas Island Immigration Detention Centre, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
By DIAC images - Christmas Island Immigration Detention Centre, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
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By Paul McFarlane - https://www.flickr.com/photos/4838612..., CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
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By DIAC images - Christmas Island Immigration Detention Centre and the Lilac compound, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
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