Fairway Rock
Coordinates: 65°37′31″N 168°44′33″W / 65.6253°N 168.7426°W
Fairway Rock (Census block 1047, Nome, Alaska) is a small islet in the Bering Strait, located southeast of the Diomede Islands and west of Alaska's Cape Prince of Wales. It has an area of 0.3 km2 (0.12 mi2). Known to Eskimo natives of the Bering Strait region in prehistory, Fairway was documented by James Cook in 1778 and named by Frederick Beechey in 1826. Although uninhabited, the island is a nesting site for seabirds — most notably the least and crested auklet — which prompt egg-collecting visits from local indigenous peoples. The United States Navy placed radioisotope thermoelectric generator-powered environmental monitoring equipment on the island from the 1960s through the 1990s.
The granite mass that is now Fairway Rock, like the larger nearby Diomede Islands, is the remnant of an earlier era of glaciation.
Fairway Rock is situated 12 mi (19 km) SSE of Little Diomede Island and 20 mi (32 km) W of Cape Prince of Wales, at 65°37′N 168°44′W / 65.617°N 168.733°W. The island is variously reported as from 300 m to 1.5 km in length. Rising steeply from the surrounding waters to 534 feet (163 m) above sea level, Fairway Rock can be easily seen from the mainland coast of Alaska at Cape Prince of Wales. Because of its steep cliffs, it poses no additional maritime hazard. The Bering Strait around Fairway Rock is relatively shallow — about 50 m in depth — and oceanographic transects show the island to lie near a current velocity minimum for the strait. Ocean currents north of Fairway Rock are occasionally studied as an example of a real-world system where a Von Kármán vortex street is generated.
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