Few places provide the opportunity for ecosystem conservation on a truly oceanic scale. A marine monument in the waters around the northernmost three islands of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands—Maug, Asuncion and Uracus—will protect and preserve a portion of the world's deepest canyon, the famed Mariana Trench.
A marine monument would include the unique geology and rare submarine ecology generated by the collision of two of the Earth's great tectonic plates, the Pacific and Philippine plates.