Christmas Island: In News
SpaceX has recently towed Starship to waters off Christmas Island after the spacecraft floated in the Indian Ocean for nearly 24 days.
- It is a special territory of Australia located in the Indian Ocean.
- The island is the summit of an oceanic mountain whose highest point on the island is Murray Hill.
- The island has steep cliffs along most of its coast.
- The main settlement and chief port is at Flying Fish Cove on the northeastern part of the island.
- Most of the island is covered in tropical rainforest. Much of the island (63%) is a national park.
- One of the island’s best-known animal residents is the Christmas Island red crab (Gecarcoidea natalis), whose spectacular annual emergence and migration draws large numbers of tourists.
- The reefs around Christmas Island have healthy coral. They are home to several rare marine animals.
- These reefs, along with those near the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, are sometimes called “Australia’s Galapagos Islands”.
- The population includes many ethnic Chinese, a small number of people of European ancestry, and Malay labourers recruited mainly from Malaysia, Singapore, and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands.
- The economy was completely based on phosphate mining and extraction earlier.
- With the mineral close to exhaustion now, subsistence cropping, fishing, and tourism serve as the backbone of its economy.
