Beijing said the costly project was benign, but U.S. officials charged that the construction of jet-plane landing strips on the virtually deserted islands meant that China was readying the parcels for military use.
Due to the practice, dating to at least the early Neolithic, of building in stone on virtually treeless islands, Shetland is extremely rich in physical remains of the prehistoric eras and there are over 5,000 archaeological sites all told.
2200 years ago, virtually all islands in the Caribbean were already colonized and recreational and artisanal fishing activities on reefs and nearshore habitats have increased and expanded dramatically since then [28], including a demand for different shark products (e.g. meat, oil, skin, fins) that extends to present times [20], [46], [47].
IMAGINE two teen-age girls, plucked from the social world of upper-class Manhattan, set down in a cottage on a virtually barren island because their father has lost his fortune.
From the Chilean sub-Antarctic to Patagonia; from the virtually untouched island of Chiloé up to the arid north; and from the foothills of the Andes to peaks of the longest mountain range in the world, Chile offered an extraordinary range of habitats, climates, species and geology.
Since the fire raged on a virtually abandoned island, firemen decided to let the flames burn out themselves.
Little in my reprehensibly limited scope could have prepared me for the astonishing beauty found on Boca Brava, a virtually uninhabited island in the Chiriquí Archipélago.
Virtually uninhabited, the islands had been protected by their remoteness, seeming to exist outside of time, and their reefs had been spared the overfishing and destruction that had ravaged neighboring reefs in the Pacific and elsewhere.
Other Information on the Web: UNESCO: Gorée Island (//webworld.unesco.org/goree/) allows you to "virtually visit" the island.
Darwin is memorialized with statues, busts, and other tributes on virtually every inhabited island, and schools in Galápagos entertain tourists with shows about evolution and the role of the islands in Darwin's formulation of evolution by natural selection.
