From California Yankee:
Fred Krupp, head of Environmental Defense, says the President's plan to designate the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef Ecosystem Reserve as a National Monument creates the world's largest marine protected area.
About the size of California, the national monument will be 38 times larger than Yellowstone, and larger even than Australia's Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. It will consist of 139,000 square miles of largely uninhabited islands, atolls, coral reef colonies and seamounts, starting 160 miles west of Kauai, the remote 1,400-mile long string of islands extends to Kure atoll, west of Midway Island.