title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: Within a six months in 1931, Conn Smythe built Maple Leaf Gardens on the northwest corner of Carlton Street and Church Street, for C$1.5 million (C$ million in 2022). The arena soon acquired nicknames including the "Carlton Street Cashbox", and the "Maple Leaf Mint", since the team's games were constantly sold out. The Maple Leafs won 11 Stanley Cups while playing at the Gardens. The first annual NHL All-Star Game was also held at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1947. The Gardens opened on November 12, 1931, with the Maple Leafs losing 2–1 to the Chicago Blackhawks. On February 13, 1999, the Maple Leafs played their last game at the Gardens, also suffering a 6–2 loss to the Blackhawks. The building is presently used as a multi-purpose facility, with a Loblaws grocery store occupying retail space on the lower floors, Joe Fresh and LCBO occupying another floor, and an athletics arena for Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University) occupying the topmost level.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: The Maple Leafs presently use two facilities in the City of Toronto. The club moved from the Gardens on February 20, 1999, to their current home arena, Air Canada Centre, later renamed Scotiabank Arena, a multi-purpose indoor entertainment arena on Bay Street in the South Core neighbourhood of Downtown Toronto. The arena is owned by the Maple Leafs' parent company MLSE and is shared with the NBA's Toronto Raptors (another MLSE subsidiary), as well as the National Lacrosse League's Toronto Rock. In addition to the main arena, the Maple Leafs also operate a practice facility at the Ford Performance Centre. The facility was opened in 2009 and operated by the Lakeshore Lions Club until September 2011, when the City of Toronto took over ownership of the facility after the Lions Club faced financial difficulties. The facility now operates as a City of Toronto-controlled corporation. The facility was known as the Mastercard Centre for Hockey Excellence until 2019 when it was renamed the Ford Performance Centre. The facility has three NHL rinks and one Olympic-sized rink.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: On January 1, 2017, the Maple Leafs played the Detroit Red Wings in a home game at BMO Field, an outdoor multipurpose stadium at Exhibition Place, home to Leafs owner MLSE's other teams: the Toronto FC and the Toronto Argonauts. Known as the NHL Centennial Classic, the outdoor game served as a celebration for both the centennial season of the franchise and the NHL.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: The Maple Leafs are presently affiliated with two minor league teams, the Toronto Marlies of the American Hockey League and the Newfoundland Growlers of the ECHL. The Marlies play from Coca-Cola Coliseum in Toronto, while the Growlers play from the Mary Brown's Centre in St. John's, Newfoundland. The Maple Leafs' parent company has owned the Marlies franchise since 1978. The Growlers became affiliated with the Maple Leafs and the Marlies before the 2018–19 season. Unlike the Marlies, the Growlers are not owned by the Leafs' parent company but are instead owned by Deacon Sports and Entertainment.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: The first AHL affiliate owned by the Maple Leafs was the Rochester Americans, a team the Leafs initially co-owned with the Montreal Canadiens from 1956 to 1959, before MLGL bought out the Canadiens' share in the team. MLGL held sole ownership of the team until it was sold to an investor group in 1966. However, it continued to serve as their minor league affiliate until 1969. The Leafs did not have an AHL affiliate from 1969 to 1978 and relied on placing their drafted players with other team's affiliates. However, after several poor draft picks and having insufficient control over their prospect's development, MLGL opted to reestablish their own farm system; co-founding the Marlies franchise in 1978, and operating the Cincinnati Tigers of the Central Hockey League from 1981 to 1982. The Marlies were initially established as the New Brunswick Hawks, and were later relocated to St. Catherines, Newmarket, and St. John's, before finally moving to Toronto in 2005.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: The Marlies was named after the Toronto Marlboros, a junior hockey team named after the Duke of Marlborough. Founded in 1903, the Marlboros were sponsored by the Leafs from 1927 to 1989. The Marlboros constituted one of two junior hockey teams the Leafs formerly sponsored, the other being the Toronto St. Michael's Majors. The sponsored junior system served as the Leafs primary farm system for young replacement players from the 1940s to 1950s. Formal NHL sponsorship of junior teams ceased in 1966, making all qualifying prospects not already on NHL-sponsored lists eligible for the draft.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: The Maple Leafs is one of six professional sports teams owned by Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment (MLSE). In 2018, "Forbes" estimated the value of the club at US$1.45 billion, making the Maple Leafs the second most valuable franchise in the NHL, after the New York Rangers. However, MLSE has refuted past valuations made by "Forbes".


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: Initially, ownership of the club was held by the Arena Gardens of Toronto, Limited; an ownership group fronted by Henry Pellatt, that owned and managed Arena Gardens. The club was named a permanent franchise in the League following its inaugural season, with team manager Charles Querrie, and the Arena Gardens treasurer Hubert Vearncombe as its owners. The Arena Company owned the club until 1919 when litigations from Eddie Livingstone forced the company to declare bankruptcy. Querrie brokered the sale of the Arena Garden's share to the owners of the amateur St. Patricks Hockey Club. Maintaining his shares in the club, Querrie fronted the new ownership group until 1927, when the club was put up for sale. Toronto Varsity Blues coach Conn Smythe put together an ownership group and purchased the franchise for $160,000. In 1929, Smythe decided, amid the Great Depression, that the Maple Leafs needed a new arena. To finance it, Smythe launched Maple Leaf Gardens Limited (MLGL), a publicly traded management company to own both the Maple Leafs and the new arena, which was named Maple Leaf Gardens. Smythe traded his stake in the Leafs for shares in MLGL and sold shares in the holding company to the public to help fund construction for the arena.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: Although Smythe was the face of MLGL from its founding, he did not gain the controlling interest in the company until 1947. Smythe remained MLGL's principal owner until 1961 when he sold 90 percent of his shares to an ownership group consisting of Harold Ballard, John Bassett and Stafford Smythe. Ballard became majority owner in February 1972 shortly following the death of Stafford Smythe. Ballard was the principal owner of MLGL until he died in 1990. The company remained a publicly traded company until 1998, when an ownership group fronted by Steve Stavro privatized the company by acquiring more than the 90 percent of stock necessary to force objecting shareholders out.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: While initially primarily a hockey company, with ownership stakes in several junior hockey clubs including the Toronto Marlboros of the Ontario Hockey Association, the company later branched out to own the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League from the late 1970s to late 1980s (though the company would later sell off the Tiger-Cats). On February 12, 1998, MLGL purchased the Toronto Raptors of the National Basketball Association, who were constructing the then-Air Canada Centre. After MLGL acquired the Raptors, the company changed its name to MLSE. The company's portfolio has since expanded to include the Toronto FC of Major League Soccer, the Toronto Marlies of the AHL, the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League, and a 37.5 percent stake in Maple Leaf Square.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: The present ownership structure emerged in 2012 after the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (the company's former principal owner) announced the sale of its 75 percent stake in MLSE to a consortium made up of telecommunications rivals Bell Canada and Rogers Communications, in a deal valued at $1.32 billion. As part of the sale, two numbered companies were created to jointly hold stock. This ownership structure ensures that, at the shareholder level, Rogers and Bell vote their overall 75 percent interest in the company together and thus decisions on the management of the company must be made by consensus between the two. A portion of Bell's share in MLSE is owned by its pension fund, to make Bell's share in MLSE under 30 percent. This was done so that Bell could retain its existing 18 percent interest in the Montreal Canadiens; as NHL's conflict of interest rules prevent any shareholder that owns more than 30 percent of a team from holding an ownership position in another. The remaining 25 percent is owned by Larry Tanenbaum, who is also the chairman of MLSE.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: "This is a partial list of the last five seasons completed by the Maple Leafs. For the full season-by-season history, see List of Toronto Maple Leafs seasons"


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: "Note: GP = Games played, W = Wins, L = Losses, T = Ties, OTL = Overtime Losses, Pts = Points, GF = Goals for, GA = Goals against"


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: In all, 25 individuals have served as captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Ken Randall served as the team's first captain for two years beginning with the inaugural 1917–18 NHL season. John Ross Roach was the first goaltender to be named captain in the NHL, and the only goaltender to serve as the Leafs' captain. He was one of only six goalies in NHL history to have been officially recognized as the team captain. George Armstrong served as captain from 1958 through 1969 and was the longest-serving captain in the team's history. In 1997, Mats Sundin became the first non-Canadian to captain the Maple Leafs. His tenure as captain holds the distinction as the longest captaincy for a non-North American-born player in NHL history. The last player named to the position was John Tavares on October 2, 2019.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: Three captains of the Maple Leafs have held the position at multiple points in their careers. Syl Apps' first tenure as the captain began from 1940 to 1943, before he stepped down and left the club to enlist in the Canadian Army. Bob Davidson served as the Maple Leafs captain until Apps' return from the Army in 1945 and resumed his captaincy until 1948. Ted Kennedy's first tenure as captain was from 1948 to 1955. He announced his retirement from the sport at the end of the 1954–55 season, with Sid Smith succeeding him as captain. Although Kennedy missed the entire 1955–56 season, he came out of retirement to play the second half of the 1956–57 season. During that half-season, Kennedy served his second tenure as the Maple Leafs' captain. Darryl Sittler was the third player to have been named the team's captain twice. As a result of a dispute between Sittler and the Maple Leafs' general manager Punch Imlach, Sittler relinquished the captaincy on December 29, 1979. The dispute was resolved in the following off-season after a heart attack hospitalized Imlach. Sittler arranged talks with Ballard to resolve the issue, eventually resuming his captaincy on September 24, 1980. No replacement captain was named during the interim period.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: The Maple Leafs have had 40 head coaches (including four interim coaches). The franchise's first head coach was Dick Carroll, who coached the team for two seasons. Several coaches have served as the Leafs head coach on multiple occasions. King Clancy was named the head coach on three occasions while Charles Querrie and Punch Imlach served the position on two occasions. Sheldon Keefe is the current head coach. He was named coach on November 20, 2019.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: Punch Imlach coached the most regular-season games of any Leafs' head coach with 770 games, and has the most all-time points with the Maple Leafs, with 865. He is followed by Pat Quinn, who coached 574 games, with 678 points all-time with the Maple Leafs. Both Mike Rodden and Dick Duff, have the fewest points with the Maple Leafs, with 0. Both were interim coaches who coached only two games each in 1927 and 1980 respectively, losing both games. Sheldon Keefe earned the most points of any Leafs head coach in a single season, with 115 points during the 2021–22 season. Five Maple Leafs' coaches have been inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame as players, while four others were inducted as builders. Pat Burns is the only Leafs' head coach to win a Jack Adams Award with the team.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: In the 1963 NHL Amateur Draft, the NHL's inaugural draft, the Maple Leafs selected Walt McKechnie, a centre from the London Nationals with their first pick, sixth overall. Two Maple Leafs captains were obtained through the draft, Darryl Sittler in the 1970 draft; as well as Wendel Clark in the 1985 NHL Entry Draft. The Maple Leafs have drafted two players with a first overall draft pick; Clark in the 1985 draft, and Auston Matthews in the 2016 draft. Rodion Amirov was the most recent player selected by the Maple Leafs in the first round, with the 15th overall pick at the 2020 draft.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: The Maple Leafs have won 13 Stanley Cups in its history. Toronto's first two Stanley Cups, in 1918 and 1922, took place when the Stanley Cup tournament operated as an interleague competition. Toronto's subsequent 11 Stanley Cups were awarded after 1926 when the Cup was established as the championship trophy of the NHL. The Maple Leafs won their last Stanley Cup in 1967; with the team's 53-season Stanley Cup drought being the longest active drought in the NHL. The Maple Leafs were also awarded the Prince of Wales Trophy twice, following the 1946–47 season, and the 1962–63 season. The Prince of Wales Trophy was awarded to the club when it was used as NHL's regular-season championship trophy.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: The Maple Leafs have retired the numbers of 19 players; as some players used the same number, only 13 numbers have been retired. Between October 17, 1992, and October 15, 2016, the Maple Leafs took a unique approach to retired numbers. Whereas players who suffered a career-ending injury had their numbers retired, "great" players had their number "honoured". Honoured numbers remained in general circulation for players, however, during Brian Burke's tenure as the Maple Leafs' general manager, the use of honoured numbers required his approval.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: During this period, only two players met the criteria for retirement, the first being number 6, worn by Ace Bailey and retired on February 14, 1934; and Bill Barilko's number 5, retired on October 17, 1992. The retirement of Bailey's number was the first of its kind in professional sports. It was briefly taken out of retirement after Bailey asked that Ron Ellis be allowed to wear his number. Bailey's number returned to retirement after Ellis's final game on January 14, 1981.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: The first players to have their numbers honoured were Syl Apps and Ted Kennedy, on October 3, 1993. Mats Sundin was the last player to have his number honoured on February 11, 2012. On October 15, 2016, before the home opening game of the team's centenary season, the Maple Leafs announced they had changed their philosophy on retiring numbers, and that the numbers of those 16 honoured players would now be retired, in addition to the retirement of Dave Keon's number.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: As well as honouring and retiring the numbers, the club also commissioned statues of former Maple Leafs. The group of statues, known as Legends Row, is a granite hockey bench with statues of former club players. Unveiled in September 2014, it is located outside Gate 5 of Scotiabank Arena, at Maple Leaf Square. As of October 2017, statues have been made of 14 players with retired numbers.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: In addition to the 13 numbers retired by the Maple Leafs, the number 99 is also retired from use in the organization. At the 2000 NHL All-Star Game hosted in Toronto, the NHL announced the league-wide retirement of Wayne Gretzky's number 99, retiring it from use throughout all its member teams, including the Maple Leafs.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: The Toronto Maple Leafs acknowledge an affiliation with 75 inductees of the Hockey Hall of Fame. The 75 inductees include 62 former players as well as 13 builders of the sport. The Maple Leafs have the greatest number of players inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame of any NHL team. The 13 individuals recognized as builders of the sport include former Maple Leafs broadcasters, executives, head coaches, and other personnel relating to the club's operations. Inducted in 2017, Dave Andreychuk was the latest Maple Leafs player to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: In addition to players and builders, five broadcasters for the Maple Leafs were also awarded the Foster Hewitt Memorial Award from the Hockey Hall of Fame. In 1984, Foster Hewitt, a radio broadcaster, was awarded the Hall of Fame's inaugural Foster Hewitt Memorial Award, an award named after Hewitt. Hewitt was already inducted as a builder into the Hall of Fame before the award's inception. Other Maple Leafs broadcasters that received the award include Wes McKnight in 1986, Bob Cole in 2007, Bill Hewitt in 2007 and Joe Bowen in 2018.


title: Toronto Maple Leafs

text: These are the top franchise leaders in regular season points, goals, assists, points per game, games played, and goaltending wins as of the end of the 2021–22 season.


title: Unix time

text: Unix time is a date and time representation widely used in computing. It measures time by the number of seconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970, the beginning of the Unix epoch, less adjustments made due to leap seconds.


title: Unix time

text: Unix time originated as the system time of Unix operating systems. It has come to be widely used in other computer operating systems, file systems, programming languages, and databases.


title: Unix time

text: Two layers of encoding make up Unix time. The first layer encodes a point in time as a scalar real number which represents the number of seconds that have passed since 00:00:00UTC on Thursday, 1 January 1970. The second layer encodes that number as a sequence of bits or decimal digits.


title: Unix time

text: Unix time differs from both Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and International Atomic Time (TAI) in its handling of leap seconds. UTC includes leap seconds that adjust for the discrepancy between precise time, as measured by atomic clocks, and solar time, relating to the position of the earth in relation to the sun. International Atomic Time (TAI), in which every day is precisely seconds long, ignores solar time and gradually loses synchronization with the Earth's rotation at a rate of roughly one second per year. In Unix time, every day contains exactly seconds but leap seconds are accounted for. Each leap second uses the timestamp of a second that immediately precedes or follows it.


title: Unix time

text: Unix time is a single signed number that increments every second, which makes it easier for computers to store and manipulate than conventional date systems. Interpreter programs can then convert it to a human-readable format.


title: Unix time

text: The "Unix epoch" is the time 00:00:00UTC on 1 January 1970. There is a problem with this definition, in that UTC did not exist in its current form until 1972; this issue is discussed below. For brevity, the remainder of this section uses ISO 8601 date and time format, in which the Unix epoch is 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z.


title: Unix time

text: The Unix time number is zero at the Unix epoch and increases by exactly per day since the epoch. Thus 2004-09-16T00:00:00Z, days after the epoch, is represented by the Unix time number × = . This can be extended backwards from the epoch too, using negative numbers; thus 1957-10-04T00:00:00Z, days before the epoch, is represented by the Unix time number × = . This applies within days as well; the time number at any given time of a day is the number of seconds that has passed since the midnight starting that day added to the time number of that midnight.


title: Unix time

text: Sometimes, Unix time is mistakenly referred to as "Epoch time", because Unix time is based on an epoch and because of a common misunderstanding that the Unix epoch is the only epoch (often called ""the Epoch"").


title: Unix time

text: The above scheme means that on a normal UTC day, which has a duration of seconds, the Unix time number changes in a continuous manner across midnight. For example, at the end of the day used in the examples above, the time representations progress as follows:


title: Unix time

text: When a leap second occurs, the UTC day is not exactly seconds long and the Unix time number (which always increases by exactly each day) experiences a discontinuity. Leap seconds may be positive or negative. No negative leap second has ever been declared, but if one were to be, then at the end of a day with a negative leap second, the Unix time number would jump up by 1 to the start of the next day. During a positive leap second at the end of a day, which occurs about every year and a half on average, the Unix time number increases continuously into the next day during the leap second and then at the end of the leap second jumps back by 1 (returning to the start of the next day). For example, this is what happened on strictly conforming POSIX.1 systems at the end of 1998:


title: Unix time

text: Unix time numbers are repeated in the second immediately following a positive leap second. The Unix time number is thus ambiguous: it can refer either to start of the leap second (2016-12-31 23:59:60) or the end of it, one second later (2017-01-01 00:00:00). In the theoretical case when a negative leap second occurs, no ambiguity is caused, but instead there is a range of Unix time numbers that do not refer to any point in UTC time at all.


title: Unix time

text: A Unix clock is often implemented with a different type of positive leap second handling associated with the Network Time Protocol (NTP). This yields a system that does not conform to the POSIX standard. See the section below concerning NTP for details.


title: Unix time

text: When dealing with periods that do not encompass a UTC leap second, the difference between two Unix time numbers is equal to the duration in seconds of the period between the corresponding points in time. This is a common computational technique. However, where leap seconds occur, such calculations give the wrong answer. In applications where this level of accuracy is required, it is necessary to consult a table of leap seconds when dealing with Unix times, and it is often preferable to use a different time encoding that does not suffer from this problem.


title: Unix time

text: A Unix time number is easily converted back into a UTC time by taking the quotient and modulus of the Unix time number, modulo . The quotient is the number of days since the epoch, and the modulus is the number of seconds since midnight UTC on that day. If given a Unix time number that is ambiguous due to a positive leap second, this algorithm interprets it as the time just after midnight. It never generates a time that is during a leap second. If given a Unix time number that is invalid due to a negative leap second, it generates an equally invalid UTC time. If these conditions are significant, it is necessary to consult a table of leap seconds to detect them.


title: Unix time

text: Commonly a Mills-style Unix clock is implemented with leap second handling not synchronous with the change of the Unix time number. The time number initially decreases where a leap should have occurred, and then it leaps to the correct time 1 second after the leap. This makes implementation easier, and is described by Mills' paper. This is what happens across a positive leap second:


title: Unix time

text: This can be decoded properly by paying attention to the leap second state variable, which unambiguously indicates whether the leap has been performed yet. The state variable change is synchronous with the leap.


title: Unix time

text: A similar situation arises with a negative leap second, where the second that is skipped is slightly too late. Very briefly the system shows a nominally impossible time number, but this can be detected by the TIME_DEL state and corrected.


title: Unix time

text: In this type of system the Unix time number violates POSIX around both types of leap second. Collecting the leap second state variable along with the time number allows for unambiguous decoding, so the correct POSIX time number can be generated if desired, or the full UTC time can be stored in a more suitable format.


title: Unix time

text: The decoding logic required to cope with this style of Unix clock would also correctly decode a hypothetical POSIX-conforming clock using the same interface. This would be achieved by indicating the TIME_INS state during the entirety of an inserted leap second, then indicating TIME_WAIT during the entirety of the following second while repeating the seconds count. This requires synchronous leap second handling. This is probably the best way to express UTC time in Unix clock form, via a Unix interface, when the underlying clock is fundamentally untroubled by leap seconds.


title: Unix time

text: Another, much rarer, non-conforming variant of Unix time keeping involves incrementing the value for all seconds, including leap seconds; some Linux systems are configured this way. Time kept in this fashion is sometimes referred to as "TAI" (although time stamps can be converted to UTC if the value corresponds to a time when the difference between TAI and UTC is known), as opposed to "UTC" (although not all UTC time values have a unique reference in systems that don't count leap seconds).


title: Unix time

text: Because TAI has no leap seconds, and every TAI day is exactly 86400 seconds long, this encoding is actually a pure linear count of seconds elapsed since 1970-01-01T00:00:10TAI. This makes time interval arithmetic much easier. Time values from these systems do not suffer the ambiguity that strictly conforming POSIX systems or NTP-driven systems have.


title: Unix time

text: In these systems it is necessary to consult a table of leap seconds to correctly convert between UTC and the pseudo-Unix-time representation. This resembles the manner in which time zone tables must be consulted to convert to and from civil time; the IANA time zone database includes leap second information, and the sample code available from the same source uses that information to convert between TAI-based time stamps and local time. Conversion also runs into definitional problems prior to the 1972 commencement of the current form of UTC (see section UTC basis below).


title: Unix time

text: This system, despite its superficial resemblance, is not Unix time. It encodes times with values that differ by several seconds from the POSIX time values. A version of this system, in which the epoch was 1970-01-01T00:00:00TAI rather than 1970-01-01T00:00:10TAI, was proposed for inclusion in ISO C's , but only the UTC part was accepted in 2011. A does, however, exist in C++20.


title: Unix time

text: A Unix time number can be represented in any form capable of representing numbers. In some applications the number is simply represented textually as a string of decimal digits, raising only trivial additional problems. However, certain binary representations of Unix times are particularly significant.


title: Unix time

text: The Unix codice_1 data type that represents a point in time is, on many platforms, a signed integer, traditionally of 32bits (but see below), directly encoding the Unix time number as described in the preceding section. Being 32 bits means that it covers a range of about 136 years in total. The minimum representable date is Friday 1901-12-13, and the maximum representable date is Tuesday 2038-01-19. One second after 03:14:07UTC 2038-01-19 this representation will overflow in what is known as the year 2038 problem.


title: Unix time

text: In some newer operating systems, codice_1 has been widened to 64 bits. This expands the times representable by approximately 292 billion years in both directions, which is over twenty times the present age of the universe per direction.


title: Unix time

text: There was originally some controversy over whether the Unix codice_1 should be signed or unsigned. If unsigned, its range in the future would be doubled, postponing the 32-bit overflow (by 68 years). However, it would then be incapable of representing times prior to the epoch. The consensus is for codice_1 to be signed, and this is the usual practice. The software development platform for version 6 of the QNX operating system has an unsigned 32-bit codice_1, though older releases used a signed type.


title: Unix time

text: The POSIX and Open Group Unix specifications include the C standard library, which includes the time types and functions defined in the codice_6 header file. The ISO C standard states that codice_1 must be an arithmetic type, but does not mandate any specific type or encoding for it. POSIX requires codice_1 to be an integer type, but does not mandate that it be signed or unsigned.


title: Unix time

text: Unix has no tradition of directly representing non-integer Unix time numbers as binary fractions. Instead, times with sub-second precision are represented using composite data types that consist of two integers, the first being a codice_1 (the integral part of the Unix time), and the second being the fractional part of the time number in millionths (in codice_10) or billionths (in codice_11). These structures provide a decimal-based fixed-point data format, which is useful for some applications, and trivial to convert for others.


title: Unix time

text: The present form of UTC, with leap seconds, is defined only starting from 1 January 1972. Prior to that, since 1 January 1961 there was an older form of UTC in which not only were there occasional time steps, which were by non-integer numbers of seconds, but also the UTC second was slightly longer than the SI second, and periodically changed to continuously approximate the Earth's rotation. Prior to 1961 there was no UTC, and prior to 1958 there was no widespread atomic timekeeping; in these eras, some approximation of GMT (based directly on the Earth's rotation) was used instead of an atomic timescale.


title: Unix time

text: The precise definition of Unix time as an encoding of UTC is only uncontroversial when applied to the present form of UTC. The Unix epoch predating the start of this form of UTC does not affect its use in this era: the number of days from 1 January 1970 (the Unix epoch) to 1 January 1972 (the start of UTC) is not in question, and the number of days is all that is significant to Unix time.


title: Unix time

text: The meaning of Unix time values below (i.e., prior to 1 January 1972) is not precisely defined. The basis of such Unix times is best understood to be an unspecified approximation of UTC. Computers of that era rarely had clocks set sufficiently accurately to provide meaningful sub-second timestamps in any case. Unix time is not a suitable way to represent times prior to 1972 in applications requiring sub-second precision; such applications must, at least, define which form of UT or GMT they use.


title: Unix time

text: , the possibility of ending the use of leap seconds in civil time is being considered. A likely means to execute this change is to define a new time scale, called "International Time", that initially matches UTC but thereafter has no leap seconds, thus remaining at a constant offset from TAI. If this happens, it is likely that Unix time will be prospectively defined in terms of this new time scale, instead of UTC. Uncertainty about whether this will occur makes prospective Unix time no less predictable than it already is: if UTC were simply to have no further leap seconds the result would be the same.


title: Unix time

text: The earliest versions of Unix time had a 32-bit integer incrementing at a rate of 60 Hz, which was the rate of the system clock on the hardware of the early Unix systems. The value 60 Hz still appears in some software interfaces as a result. As late as November of 1971, Unix was still counting time in 60ths of a second since an epoch of 1 January 1971, which is a year later than the epoch currently used. This timestamp could only represent a range of about 2.5 years, forcing the epoch and units counted to be redefined. Early definitions of Unix time also lacked timezones.


title: Unix time

text: The current epoch of 1 January 1970 00:00:00 UTC was selected arbitrarily by Unix engineers because it was considered a convenient date to work with. The precision was changed to count in seconds in order to avoid short-term overflow.


title: Unix time

text: When POSIX.1 was written, the question arose of how to precisely define codice_1 in the face of leap seconds. The POSIX committee considered whether Unix time should remain, as intended, a linear count of seconds since the epoch, at the expense of complexity in conversions with civil time or a representation of civil time, at the expense of inconsistency around leap seconds. Computer clocks of the era were not sufficiently precisely set to form a precedent one way or the other.


title: Unix time

text: The POSIX committee was swayed by arguments against complexity in the library functions, and firmly defined the Unix time in a simple manner in terms of the elements of UTC time. This definition was so simple that it did not even encompass the entire leap year rule of the Gregorian calendar, and would make 2100 a leap year.


title: Unix time

text: The 2001 edition of POSIX.1 rectified the faulty leap year rule in the definition of Unix time, but retained the essential definition of Unix time as an encoding of UTC rather than a linear time scale. Since the mid-1990s, computer clocks have been routinely set with sufficient precision for this to matter, and they have most commonly been set using the UTC-based definition of Unix time. This has resulted in considerable complexity in Unix implementations, and in the Network Time Protocol, to execute steps in the Unix time number whenever leap seconds occur.


title: Unix time

text: Unix time was designed to encode calendar dates and times in a compact manner intended for use by computers internally. It is not intended to be easily read by humans or to store timezone-dependent values. It is also limited by default to representing time in seconds, making it unsuited for use when a more precise measurement of time is needed, such as when measuring the execution time of programs.


title: Unix time

text: Unix time by design does not require a specific size for the storage, but most common implementations of Unix time use a signed integer with the word size of the underlying computer. As the majority of modern computers are 32-bit or 64-bit, and a large number of programs are still written in 32-bit compatibility mode, this means that many systems using Unix time are using signed 32-bit integer fields. The maximum value of a signed 32 bit integer is 2-1, and the minimum value is -(2), making it impossible to represent dates before December 13, 1901 (at 20:45:52 UTC) or after January 19, 2038 (at 03:14:07 UTC). The early cutoff can have an impact on databases that are storing historical information; in some databases where 32-bit Unix time is used for timestamps, it may be necessary to store time in a different form of field, such as a string, to represent dates before 1901. The late cutoff is known as the Year 2038 problem and has the potential to cause issues as the date approaches, as dates beyond the 2038 cutoff would wrap back around to the start of the representable range in 1901.


title: Unix time

text: 64-bit storage of Unix time is generally assumed not to have issues with date range limitations, as the effective range of dates representable with Unix time stored in a signed 64-bit integer is over 584 billion years, or around 42 times larger than the current estimated age of the universe.


title: Unix time

text: Within Unix operating systems, alternative methods for storing and presenting time exist, including , which stores microseconds as well as seconds. Unix time is also not the only standard for time that counts away from an epoch. The Active Directory Time Service is used primarily on Windows computers and in Windows file systems and stores time as a count of 100-nanosecond intervals that have elapsed since 0:00 GMT on January 1, 1601. The Network Time Protocol used to coordinate time between computers uses an epoch of January 1, 1900, counted in an unsigned 32-bit integer for seconds and another unsigned 32-bit integer for fractional seconds, which rolls over every 2 seconds (about once every 136 years).


title: Unix time

text: Many applications and programming languages provide methods for storing time with an explicit timezone. There are also a number of time format standards which exist to be readable by both humans and computers, such as ISO 8601.


title: Unix time

text: Unix enthusiasts have a history of holding "time_t parties" (pronounced "time tea parties") to celebrate significant values of the Unix time number. These are directly analogous to the new year celebrations that occur at the change of year in many calendars. As the use of Unix time has spread, so has the practice of celebrating its milestones. Usually it is time values that are round numbers in decimal that are celebrated, following the Unix convention of viewing codice_1 values in decimal. Among some groups round binary numbers are also celebrated, such as +2 which occurred at 13:37:04 UTC on Saturday, 10 January 2004.


title: Unix time

text: The events that these celebrate are typically described as ""N" seconds since the Unix epoch", but this is inaccurate; as discussed above, due to the handling of leap seconds in Unix time the number of seconds elapsed since the Unix epoch is slightly greater than the Unix time number for times later than the epoch.


title: Unix time

text: Vernor Vinge's novel "A Deepness in the Sky" describes a spacefaring trading civilization thousands of years in the future that still uses the Unix epoch. The "programmer-archaeologist" responsible for finding and maintaining usable code in mature computer systems first believes that the epoch refers to the time when man first walked on the Moon, but then realizes that it is "the 0-second of one of humankind's first computer operating systems".


title: Diego Garcia

text: Diego Garcia is an island of the British Indian Ocean Territory, a disputed overseas territory of the United Kingdom. It is a militarised atoll just south of the equator in the central Indian Ocean, and the largest of the 60 small islands of the Chagos Archipelago. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to find it and it was then settled by the French in the 1790s and transferred to British rule after the Napoleonic Wars. It was one of the "Dependencies" of the British Colony of Mauritius until the Chagos Islands were detached for inclusion in the newly created British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) in 1965.


title: Diego Garcia

text: In 1966, the population of the island was 924. These people were employed as contract farm workers primarily on copra plantations owned by the Chagos-Agalega company. Although it was common for local plantation managers to allow pensioners and the disabled to remain in the islands and continue to receive housing and rations in exchange for light work, children after the age of 12 were required to work. In 1964, only 3 of a population of 963 were unemployed. In April 1967, the BIOT Administration bought out Chagos-Agalega for £600,000, thus becoming the sole property owner in the BIOT. The Crown immediately leased back the properties to Chagos-Agalega but the company terminated the lease at the end of 1967.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Between 1968 and 1973, the inhabitants were forcibly expelled from Diego Garcia by the UK Government so a joint US/UK military base could be established on the island. Many were deported to Mauritius and the Seychelles, following which the United States built the large Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia, which has been in continuous operation since then. In 2019, this action and continued British administration of the archipelago were deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice in The Hague, a ruling the United Nations General Assembly supported. However, the British dismissed this ruling as not legally binding. , Diego Garcia is the only inhabited island of the BIOT; the population is composed of military personnel and supporting contractors. It is one of two critical US bomber bases in the Indo-Pacific region, along with Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, Pacific Ocean.


title: Diego Garcia

text: The atoll is located east of Tanzania's coast, south-southwest of the southern tip of India (at Kanyakumari), and west-northwest of the west coast of Australia (at Cape Range National Park, Western Australia). Diego Garcia lies at the southernmost tip of the Chagos-Laccadive Ridge, a vast underwater mountain range with peaks consisting of coral reefs, atolls, and islands comprising Lakshadweep, the Maldives, and the Chagos Archipelago. Local time is year-round.


title: Diego Garcia

text: According to Southern Maldivian oral tradition, traders and fishermen were occasionally lost at sea and got stranded on one of the islands of the Chagos. Eventually, they were rescued and brought back home. However, the different atolls of the Chagos have no individual names in the Maldivian oral tradition.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Nothing is known of pre-European contact history of Diego Garcia. Speculations include visits during the Austronesian diaspora around 700 CE, as some say the old Maldivian name for the islands originated from Malagasy. Arabs, who reached Lakshadweep and Maldives around 900 CE, may have visited the Chagos.


title: Diego Garcia

text: The uninhabited islands were discovered by the Portuguese navigator, explorer, and diplomat Pedro Mascarenhas in 1512, first named as Dom Garcia, in honour of his patron, Dom Garcia de Noronha when he was detached from the Portuguese India Armadas during his voyage of 1512–1513. Another Portuguese expedition with a Spanish explorer of Andalusian origin, Diego García de Moguer, rediscovered the island in 1544 and named it after himself. Garcia de Moguer died the same year on the return trip to Portugal in the Indian Ocean, off the South African coast. The misnomer "Diego" could have been made unwittingly by the British ever since, as they copied the Portuguese maps. It is assumed that the island was named after one of its first two discoverers—the one by the name of Garcia, the other with name Diego. Also, a cacography of the saying "Deo Gracias" ("Thank God") is eligible for the attribution of the atoll. Although the Cantino planisphere (1504) and the Ruysch map (1507) clearly delineate the Maldive Islands, giving them the same names, they do not show any islands to the south which can be identified as the Chagos archipelago.


title: Diego Garcia

text: The Sebastian Cabot map (Antwerp 1544) shows a number of islands to the south which may be the Mascarene Islands. The first map which identifies and names ""Los Chagos"" (in about the right position) is that of Pierre Desceliers (Dieppe 1550), although Diego Garcia is not named. An island called "Don Garcia" appears on the "Theatrum Orbis Terrarum" of Abraham Ortelius (Antwerp 1570), together with "Dos Compagnos", slightly to the north. It may be the case that "Don Garcia" was named after Garcia de Noronha, although no evidence exists to support this. The island is also labelled "Don Garcia" on Mercator's "Nova et Aucta Orbis Terrae Descriptio ad Usum Navigatium Emendate" (Duisburg 1569). However, on the "Vera Totius Expeditionis Nauticae Description" of Jodocus Hondius (London 1589), "Don Garcia" mysteriously changes its name to "I. de Dio Gratia", while the "I. de Chagues" appears close by.


title: Diego Garcia

text: The first map to delineate the island under its present name, Diego Garcia, is the "World Map" of Edward Wright (London 1599), possibly as a result of misreading Dio (or simply "D.") as Diego, and Gratia as Garcia. The "Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Geographica" of Hendrik Hondius II (Antwerp 1630) repeats Wright's use of the name, which is then proliferated on all subsequent Dutch maps of the period, and to the present day.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Diego Garcia and the rest of the Chagos islands were uninhabited until the late 18th century. In 1778, the French Governor of Mauritius granted Monsieur Dupuit de la Faye the island of Diego Garcia, and evidence exists of temporary French visits to collect coconuts and fish. Several Frenchmen living in "a dozen huts" abandoned Diego Garcia when the British East India Company attempted to establish a settlement there in April 1786. The supplies of the 275 settlers were overwhelmed by 250 survivors of the wreck of the British East Indian Ship "Atlas" in May, and the colony failed in October. Following the departure of the British, the French colony of Mauritius began marooning lepers on the island, and in 1793, the French established a coconut plantation using slave labour, which exported, too, cordage made from coir (coconut fibre), and sea cucumbers as a far-eastern delicacy.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Diego Garcia became a colony of the UK after the Napoleonic Wars as part of the Treaty of Paris (1814), and from 1814 to 1965 it was administered from Mauritius; the main plantations were at East Point, the main settlement, Minni Minni, north of East Point, and Pointe Marianne, on the western rim, all on the lagoon side of the atoll. The workers lived at each and at villages scattered around the atoll.


title: Diego Garcia

text: From 1881 until 1888, the atoll hosted two coaling stations for steamships crossing the Indian Ocean.


title: Diego Garcia

text: In 1882, the French-financed, Mauritian-based Société Huilière de Diego et de Peros (the "Oilmaking Company of Diego and Peros"), consolidated all the plantations in the Chagos under its control.


title: Diego Garcia

text: In 1914, the island was visited by the German light cruiser SMS "Emden" halfway through its commerce-raiding cruise during the early months of World War I.


title: Diego Garcia

text: In 1942, the British opened RAF Station Diego Garcia and established an advanced flying boat unit at the East Point Plantation, staffed and equipped by No. 205 and No. 240 Squadrons, then stationed on Ceylon. Both Catalina and Sunderland aircraft were flown during the course of World War II in search of Japanese and German submarines and surface raiders. At Cannon Point, two 6-inch naval guns were installed by a Royal Marines detachment. In February 1942, the mission was to protect the small Royal Navy base and Royal Air Force station located on the island from Japanese attack. Operation of the guns was later taken over by Mauritian and Indian Coastal Artillery troops. Following the conclusion of hostilities, the station was closed on 30 April 1946.


title: Diego Garcia

text: In 1962, the Chagos Agalega Company of the British colony of Seychelles purchased the Société Huilière de Diego et Peros and moved company headquarters to Seychelles.


title: Diego Garcia

text: In the early 1960s, the UK was withdrawing its military presence from the Indian Ocean, not including the airfield at RAF Gan to the north of Diego Garcia in the Maldives (which remained open until 1976), and agreed to permit the United States to establish a naval communication station on one of its island territories there. The United States requested an unpopulated island belonging to the UK to avoid political difficulties with newly independent countries, and ultimately the UK and United States agreed that Diego Garcia was a suitable location.


title: Diego Garcia

text: To accomplish the UK–US mutual defence strategy, in November 1965, the UK purchased the Chagos Archipelago, which includes Diego Garcia, from the then self-governing colony of Mauritius for £3 million to create the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), with the intent of ultimately closing the plantations to provide the uninhabited British territory from which the United States would conduct its military activities in the region.


title: Diego Garcia

text: In April 1966, the British government bought the entire assets of the Chagos Agalega Company in the BIOT for £600,000 and administered them as a government enterprise and immediately leased the plantations back to Chagos Agalega while awaiting United States funding of the proposed facilities, with an interim objective of paying for the administrative expenses of the new territory. However, the plantations, both under their previous private ownership and under government administration, proved consistently unprofitable due to the introduction of new oils and lubricants in the international marketplace, and the establishment of vast coconut plantations in the East Indies and the Philippines and the company terminated the lease at the end of 1967.


title: Diego Garcia

text: On 30 December 1966, the United States and the UK executed an agreement through an Exchange of Notes which permitted the United States to use the BIOT for defence purposes for 50 years until December 2016, followed by a 20-year extension (to 2036) as long as neither party gave notice of termination in a two-year window (December 2014 – December 2016) and the UK may decide on what additional terms to extend the agreement. No monetary payment was made from the United States to the UK as part of this agreement or any subsequent amendment. Rather, the United Kingdom received a US$14-million discount from the United States on the acquisition of submarine-launched Polaris missiles per a now-declassified addendum to the 1966 agreement.


title: Diego Garcia

text: To the United States, Diego Garcia was a prime territory for setting up a foreign military base. According to Stuart Barber—a civilian working for the US Navy at the Pentagon—Diego Garcia was located far away from any potential threats, it was low in a native population and it was an island that was not sought after by other countries as it lacked economic interest. To Barber, Diego Garcia and other acquired islands would play a key role in maintaining US dominance. Here Barber designed the strategic island concept, where the US would obtain as many less populated islands as possible for military purposes. According to Barber, this was the only way to ensure security for a foreign base. Diego Garcia is often referred to as "Fantasy Island" for its seclusion.


title: Diego Garcia

text: The key component in obtaining Diego Garcia was the perceived lack of a native population on the island. Uninhabited until the late 18th century, Diego Garcia had no indigenous population. Its only inhabitants were European overseers who managed the coconut plantations for their absentee landowners and contract workers mostly of African, Indian, and Malay ancestry, known as Chagossians, who had lived and worked on the plantations for several generations. Prior to setting up a military base, the United States government was informed by the British government—which owned the island—that Diego Garcia had a population of hundreds. The eventual number of Chagossians numbered around 1,000.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Regardless of the size of the population, the Chagossians had to be removed from the island before the base could be constructed. In 1968, the first tactics were implemented to decrease the population of Diego Garcia. Those who left the island—either for vacation or medical purposes—were not allowed to return, and those who stayed could obtain only restricted food and medical supplies. This tactic was in hope that those that stayed would leave "willingly". One of the tactics used was that of killing Chagossian pets.


title: Diego Garcia

text: In March 1971, United States Naval construction battalions arrived on Diego Garcia to begin the construction of the communications station and an airfield. To satisfy the terms of an agreement between the UK and the United States for an uninhabited island, the plantation on Diego Garcia was closed in October of that year. The plantation workers and their families were relocated to the plantations on Peros Bahnos and Salomon atolls to the northwest. The by-then-independent Mauritian government refused to accept the islanders without payment, and in 1974, the UK gave the Mauritian government an additional £650,000 to resettle the islanders. Those who still remained on the island of Diego Garcia between 1971 and 1973 were forced onto cargo ships that were heading to Mauritius and the Seychelles.


title: Diego Garcia

text: By 1973, construction of the Naval Communications Station was completed. In the early 1970s, setbacks to United States military capabilities in the region including the fall of Saigon, victory of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the closure of the Peshawar Air Station listening post in Pakistan and Kagnew Station in Eritrea, the "Mayaguez" incident, and the build-up of Soviet naval presence in Aden and a Soviet airbase at Berbera, Somalia, caused the United States to request, and the UK to approve, permission to build a fleet anchorage and enlarged airfield on Diego Garcia, and the Seabees doubled the number of workers constructing these facilities.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Following the fall of the Shah of Iran and the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1979–1980, the West became concerned with ensuring the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz, and the United States received permission for a $400-million expansion of the military facilities on Diego Garcia consisting of two parallel runways, expansive parking aprons for heavy bombers, 20 new anchorages in the lagoon, a deep-water pier, port facilities for the largest naval vessels in the American or British fleet, aircraft hangars, maintenance buildings and an air terminal, a fuel storage area, and billeting and messing facilities for thousands of sailors and support personnel.


title: Diego Garcia

text: On 23 June 2017, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voted in favour of referring the territorial dispute between Mauritius and the UK to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in order to clarify the legal status of the Chagos Islands archipelago in the Indian Ocean. The motion was approved by a majority vote with 94 voting for and 15 against.


title: Diego Garcia

text: In February 2019, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that the United Kingdom must transfer the islands to Mauritius as they were not legally separated from the latter in 1965. The UK Foreign Office said the ruling is not legally binding. In May 2019, the United Nations General Assembly affirmed the decision of the International Court of Justice and demanded that the United Kingdom withdraw its colonial administration from the Islands and cooperate with Mauritius to facilitate the resettlement of Mauritian nationals in the archipelago. In a written statement, the U.S. government said that neither the Americans nor the British have any plans to discontinue use of the military base on Diego Garcia. The statement said in a footnote: "In 2016, there were discussions between the United Kingdom and the United States concerning the continuing importance of the joint base. Neither party gave notice to terminate and the agreement remains in force until 2036".


title: Diego Garcia

text: In June 2020, a Mauritian official offered to allow the United States to retain its military base on the island if Mauritius succeeded in regaining sovereignty over the Chagos archipelago.


title: Diego Garcia

text: On 1 April 2010, the Chagos Marine Protected Area (MPA) was declared to cover the waters around the Chagos Archipelago. However, Mauritius objected, stating this was contrary to its legal rights, and on 18 March 2015, in light of the "Mauritius v. United Kingdom" case, the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled that the Chagos Marine Protected Area was illegal under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea as Mauritius had legally binding rights to fish in the waters surrounding the Chagos Archipelago, to an eventual return of the Chagos Archipelago, and to the preservation of any minerals or oil discovered in or near the Chagos Archipelago prior to its return.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Diego Garcia had no permanent inhabitants when discovered by the Spanish explorer Diego García de Moguer in the 16th century, then in the service of Portugal, and this remained the case until it was settled as a French colony in 1793.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Most inhabitants of Diego Garcia through the period 1793–1971 were plantation workers, but also included Franco-Mauritian managers, Indo-Mauritian administrators, Mauritian and Seychellois contract employees, and in the late 19th century, Chinese and Somali employees.


title: Diego Garcia

text: A distinct Creole culture called the Ilois, which means "islanders" in French Creole, evolved from these workers. The Ilois, now called Chagos Islanders or Chagossians since the late-1990s, were descended primarily from slaves brought to the island from Madagascar by the French between 1793 and 1810, and Malay slaves from the slave market on Pulo Nyas, an island off the northwest coast of Sumatra, from around 1820 until the slave trade ended following the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. The Ilois also evolved a French-based Creole dialect now called Chagossian Creole.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Throughout their recorded history, the plantations of the Chagos Archipelago had a population of approximately 1,000 individuals, about two-thirds of whom lived on Diego Garcia. A peak population of 1,142 on all islands was recorded in 1953.


title: Diego Garcia

text: The primary industry throughout the island's colonial period consisted of coconut plantations producing copra and/or coconut oil, until closure of the plantations and forced relocation of the inhabitants in October 1971. For a brief period in the 1880s, it served as a coaling station for steamships transiting the Indian Ocean from the Suez Canal to Australia.


title: Diego Garcia

text: All the inhabitants of Diego Garcia were forcibly resettled to other islands in the Chagos Archipelago, Mauritius or Seychelles by 1971 to satisfy the requirements of a UK/United States Exchange of Notes signed in 1966 to depopulate the island when the United States constructed a base upon it. No current agreement exists on how many of the evacuees met the criteria to be an Ilois, and thus be an indigenous person at the time of their removal, but the UK and Mauritian governments agreed in 1972 that 426 families, numbering 1,151 individuals, were due compensation payments as exiled Ilois. The total number of people certified as Ilois by the Mauritian Government's Ilois Trust Fund Board in 1982 was 1,579.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Fifteen years after the last expulsion, the Chagossians received compensation from the British, totalling $6,000 per person; some Chagossians received nothing. The British expulsion action remains in litigation . Today, Chagossians remain highly impoverished and are living as "marginalised" outsiders on the island of Mauritius and the Seychelles.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Between 1971 and 2001, the only residents on Diego Garcia were UK and US military personnel and civilian employees of those countries. These included contract employees from the Philippines and Mauritius, including some Ilois. During combat operations from the atoll against Afghanistan (2001–2006) and Iraq (2003–2006), a number of allied militaries were based on the island including Australian, Japanese, and the Republic of Korea. According to David Vine, "Today, at any given time, 3,000 to 5,000 US troops and civilian support staff live on the island." The inhabitants today do not rely on the island and the surrounding waters for sustenance. Although some recreational fishing for consumption is permitted, all other food is shipped in by sea or air.


title: Diego Garcia

text: In 2004, US Navy recruitment literature described Diego Garcia as being one of the world's best-kept secrets, boasting great recreational facilities, exquisite natural beauty, and outstanding living conditions.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Diego Garcia is the only inhabited island in the British Indian Ocean Territory, an overseas territory of the United Kingdom, usually abbreviated as "BIOT". The Government of the BIOT consists of a commissioner appointed by King Charles III. The commissioner is based in London, resident in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), and is assisted by an administrator and small staff.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Originally colonised by the French, Diego Garcia was ceded, along with the rest of the Chagos Archipelago, to the United Kingdom in the Treaty of Paris (1814) at the conclusion of a portion of the Napoleonic Wars. Diego Garcia and the Chagos Archipelago were administered by the colonial government on the island of Mauritius until 1965, when the UK purchased them from the self-governing colony of Mauritius for £3 million, and declared them to be a separate British Overseas Territory. The BIOT administration was moved to Seychelles following the independence of Mauritius in 1968 until the independence of Seychelles in 1976, and to a desk in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London since.


title: Diego Garcia

text: The UK represents the territory internationally. A local government as normally envisioned does not exist. Rather, the administration is represented in the territory by the officer commanding British Forces on Diego Garcia, the "Brit rep". Laws and regulations are promulgated by the commissioner and enforced in the BIOT by Brit rep.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Of major concern to the BIOT administration is the relationship with the United States military forces resident on Diego Garcia. An annual meeting called "The Pol-Mil Talks" (for "political-military") of all concerned is held at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London to resolve pertinent issues. These resolutions are formalised by an "Exchange of Letters".


title: Diego Garcia

text: Neither the US nor the UK recognises Diego Garcia as being subject to the African Nuclear Weapons Free Zone Treaty, which lists BIOT as covered by the treaty.<ref name="10.1093/jel/eqn034"></ref> It is not publicly known whether nuclear weapons have ever been stored on the island. Noam Chomsky and Peter Sand have observed and emphasised that the US and UK stance is blocking the implementation of the treaty.


title: Diego Garcia

text: There are two transnational political issues which affect Diego Garcia and the BIOT, through the British government.


title: Diego Garcia

text: On 3 November 2022, the British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly announced that the UK and Mauritius had decided to begin negotiations on sovereignty over the British Indian Ocean Territory, taking into account international legal proceedings. Both states had agreed to ensure the continued operation of the joint UK/US military base on Diego Garcia.


title: Diego Garcia

text: In 2015, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, said Diego Garcia was used by the CIA for "nefarious activities". He said that he had heard from three US intelligence sources that Diego Garcia was used as "a transit site where people were temporarily housed, let us say, and interrogated from time to time" and, "What I heard was more along the lines of using it as a transit location when perhaps other places were full or other places were deemed too dangerous or insecure, or unavailable at the moment".


title: Diego Garcia

text: In June 2004, the British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw stated that United States authorities had repeatedly assured him that no detainees had passed in transit through Diego Garcia or were disembarked there.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Diego Garcia was rumoured to have been one of the locations of the CIA's black sites in 2005. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is one of the "high-value detainees" suspected to have been held in Diego Garcia. In October 2007, the Foreign Affairs Select Committee of the British Parliament announced that it would launch an investigation of continued allegations of a prison camp on Diego Garcia, which it claimed were twice confirmed by comments made by retired U.S. Army general Barry McCaffrey. On 31 July 2008, an unnamed former White House official alleged that the United States had imprisoned and interrogated at least one suspect on Diego Garcia during 2002 and possibly 2003.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Manfred Nowak, one of five United Nations special rapporteurs on torture, said that credible evidence exists supporting allegations that ships serving as black sites have used Diego Garcia as a base. The human rights group Reprieve alleged that United States-operated ships moored outside the territorial waters of Diego Garcia were used to incarcerate and torture detainees.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Several groups claim that the military base on Diego Garcia has been used by the United States government for transport of prisoners involved in the controversial extraordinary rendition program, an allegation formally reported to the Council of Europe in June 2007. On 21 February 2008, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband admitted that two United States extraordinary rendition flights refuelled on Diego Garcia in 2002, and was "very sorry" that earlier denials were having to be corrected.


title: Diego Garcia

text: According to Wikileaks CableGate documents, in a calculated move planned in 2009, the UK proposed that the BIOT become a "marine reserve" with the aim of preventing the former inhabitants from returning to the islands. A summary of the diplomatic cable is as follows:


title: Diego Garcia

text: No species of plants, birds, amphibians, reptiles, molluscs, crustaceans, or mammals is endemic on Diego Garcia or in the surrounding waters. Several endemic fish and aquatic invertebrates are present, though. All plants, wildlife, and aquatic species are protected to one degree or another. In addition, much of the lagoon waters are protected wetlands as a designated Ramsar site, and large parts of the island are nature preserves.


title: Diego Garcia

text: In 2004, the UK applied for, and received, Ramsar site wetlands conservation status for the lagoon and other waters of Diego Garcia.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Diego Garcia is the largest land mass in the Chagos Archipelago (which includes Peros Banhos, the Salomon Islands, the Three Brothers, the Egmont Islands, and the Great Chagos Bank), being an atoll occupying approximately , of which is dry land. The continuous portion of the atoll rim stretches from one end to the other, enclosing a lagoon long and up to wide, with a pass opening at the north. Three small islands are located in the pass.


title: Diego Garcia

text: The island consists of the largest continuous dryland rim of all atolls in the world. The dryland rim varies in width from a few hundred metres to 2.4 km. Typical of coral atolls, it has a maximum elevation on some dunes on the ocean side of the rim of 9 m (30 ft) above mean low water. The rim nearly encloses a lagoon about long and up to wide. The atoll forms a nearly complete rim of land around a lagoon, enclosing 90% of its perimeter, with an opening only in the north. The main island is the largest of about 60 islands which form the Chagos Archipelago. Besides the main island, three small islets are at the mouth of the lagoon: West Island (), Middle Island () and East Island (). A fourth, Anniversary Island, 1 km (1,100 yards) southwest of Middle Island, appears as just a sand bar on satellite images. Both Middle Island and Anniversary Island are part of the Spur Reef complex.


title: Diego Garcia

text: The total area of the atoll is about . The lagoon area is roughly with depths ranging down to about . The total land area (excluding peripheral reefs) is around . The coral reef surrounding the seaward side of the atoll is generally broad, flat, and shallow around below mean sea level in most locations and varying from in width. This fringing seaward reef shelf comprises an area around . At the outer edge of the reef shelf, the bottom slopes very steeply into deep water, at some locations dropping to more than within of the shore.


title: Diego Garcia

text: In the lagoon, numerous coral heads present hazards to navigation. The shallow reef shelf surrounding the island on the ocean side offers no ocean-side anchorage. The channel and anchorage areas in the northern half of the lagoon are dredged, along with the pre-1971 ship turning basin. Significant saltwater wetlands called barachois exist in the southern half of the lagoon. These small lagoons off of the main lagoon are filled with seawater at high tide and dry at low tide. Scientific expeditions in 1996 and 2006 described the lagoon and surrounding waters of Diego Garcia, along with the rest of the Chagos Archipelago, as "exceptionally unpolluted" and "pristine".


title: Diego Garcia

text: Diego Garcia is frequently subject to earthquakes caused by tectonic plate movement along the Carlsberg Ridge located just to the west of the island. One was recorded in 1812; one measuring 7.6 on the Richter Scale hit on 30 November 1983, at 23:46 local time and lasted 72 seconds, resulting in minor damage including wave damage to a 50-m stretch of the southern end of the island, and another on 2 December 2002, an earthquake measuring 4.6 on the Richter scale struck the island at 12:21 am.


title: Diego Garcia

text: In December 2004, a tsunami generated near Indonesia caused minor shoreline erosion on Barton Point (the northeast point of the atoll of Diego Garcia).


title: Diego Garcia

text: Diego Garcia lies within the influence of the South Equatorial current year-round. The surface currents of the Indian Ocean also have a monsoonal regimen associated with the Asian Monsoonal wind regimen. Sea surface temperatures are in the range of year-round.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Diego Garcia is the above-water rim of a coral atoll composed of Holocene coral rubble and sand to the depth of about , overlaying Pleistocene limestone deposited at the then-sea level on top of a seamount rising about from the floor of the Indian Ocean. The Holocene sediments are porous and completely saturated with sea water. Any rain falling on the above-water rim quickly percolates through the surface sand and encounters the salt water underneath. Diego Garcia is of sufficient width to minimise tidal fluctuations in the aquifer, and the rainfall (in excess of 102.5 inches/260 cm per year on average) is sufficient in amount and periodicity for the fresh water to form a series of convex, freshwater, Ghyben-Herzberg lenses floating on the heavier salt water in the saturated sediments.


title: Diego Garcia

text: The horizontal structure of each lens is influenced by variations in the type and porosity of the subsurface deposits, which on Diego Garcia are minor. At depth, the lens is globular; near the surface, it generally conforms to the shape of the island. When a Ghyben-Herzberg lens is fully formed, its floating nature will push a freshwater head above mean sea level, and if the island is wide enough, the depth of the lens below mean sea level will be 40 times the height of the water table above sea level. On Diego Garcia, this equates to a maximum depth of 20 m. However, the actual size and depth of each lens is dependent on the width and shape of the island at that point, the permeability of the aquifer, and the equilibrium between recharging rainfall and losses to evaporation to the atmosphere, transpiration by plants, tidal advection, and human use.


title: Diego Garcia

text: In the plantation period, shallow wells, supplemented by rainwater collected in cisterns, provided sufficient water for the pastoral lifestyle of the small population. On Diego Garcia today, the military base uses over 100 shallow "horizontal" wells to produce over 560,000 L per day from the "Cantonment" lens on the northwest arm of the island—sufficient water for western-style usage for a population of 3,500. This 3.7 km lens holds an estimated 19 million m of fresh water and has an average daily recharge from rainfall over 10,000 m, of which 40% remains in the lens and 60% is lost through evapotranspiration.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Extracting fresh water from a lens for human consumption requires careful calculation of the sustainable yield of the lens by season because each lens is susceptible to corruption by saltwater intrusion caused by overuse or drought. In addition, overwash by tsunamis and tropical storms has corrupted lenses in the Maldives and several Pacific islands. Vertical wells can cause salt upcoming into the lens, and overextraction will reduce freshwater pressure resulting in lateral intrusion by seawater. Because the porosity of the surface soil results in virtually zero runoff, lenses are easily polluted by fecal waste, burials, and chemical spills. Corruption of a lens can take years to "flush out" and reform, depending on the ratio of recharge to losses.


title: Diego Garcia

text: A few natural depressions on the atoll rim capture the abundant rainfall to form areas of freshwater wetlands. Two are of significance to island wildlife and to recharge their respective freshwater lenses. One of these is centred on the northwest point of the atoll; another is found near the Point Marianne Cemetery on the southeast end of the airfield. Other, smaller freshwater wetlands are found along the east side of the runway, and in the vicinity of the receiver antenna field on the northwest arm of the atoll.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Also, several man-made freshwater ponds resulted from excavations made during construction of the airfield and road on the western half of the atoll rim. These fill from rainfall and from extending into the Ghyben-Herzberg lenses found on this island.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Diego Garcia has an equatorial tropical rainforest climate (Köppen "Af"). The surrounding sea surface temperature is the primary climatic control, and temperatures are generally uniform throughout the year, with an average maximum of by day during March and April, and from July to September. Diurnal variation is roughly , falling to the low by night. Humidity is high throughout the year. The almost constant breeze keeps conditions reasonably comfortable.


title: Diego Garcia

text: From December through March, winds are generally westerly around . During April and May, winds are light and variable, ultimately backing to an east-southeasterly direction. From June through September, the influence of the Southeast trades is felt, with speeds of 10–15 knots. During October and November, winds again go through a period of light and variable conditions veering to a westerly direction with the onset of summer in the Southern Hemisphere.


title: Diego Garcia

text: All precipitation falls as rain, characterised by air mass-type showers. Annual rainfall averages , with the heaviest precipitation from September to April. January is the wettest month with of mean monthly precipitation, and August the driest month, averaging of mean monthly precipitation.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Thunderstorm activity is generally noticed during the afternoon and evenings during the summer months (December through March), when the Intertropical Convergence Zone is in the vicinity of the island.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Diego Garcia is at minimum risk from tropical cyclones due to its proximity to the equator where the coriolis parameter required to organise circulation of the upper atmosphere is minimal. Low-intensity storms have hit the island, including one in 1901, which blew over 1,500 coconut trees; one on 16 September 1944, which caused the wreck of a Royal Air Force PBY Catalina; one in September 1990 which demolished the tent city then being constructed for United States Air Force bomber crews during Operation Desert Storm; and one on 22 July 2007, when winds exceeded and over of rain fell in 24 hours.


title: Diego Garcia

text: The island was somewhat affected by the tsunami caused by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. Service personnel on the western arm of the island reported only a minor increase in wave activity. The island was protected to a large degree by its favourable ocean topography. About east of the atoll lies the 650-km-long (400-mile) Chagos Trench, an underwater canyon plunging more than . The depth of the trench and its grade to the atoll's slope and shelf shore makes it more difficult for substantial tsunami waves to build before passing the atoll from the east. In addition, near-shore coral reefs and an algal platform may have dissipated much of the waves' impact. A biological survey conducted in early 2005 indicated erosional effects of the tsunami wave on Diego Garcia and other islands of the Chagos Archipelago. One stretch of shoreline was found to have been breached by the tsunami wave, representing about 10% of the eastern arm. A biological survey by the Chagos Conservation Trust reported that the resulting inundation additionally washed away shoreline shrubs and small to medium-sized coconut palms.


title: Diego Garcia

text: The first botanical observations of the island were made by Hume in 1883, when the coconut plantations had been in operation for a full century. Subsequent studies and collections during the plantation era were made in 1885, 1905, 1939, and 1967. Thus, very little of the nature of the precontact vegetation is known.


title: Diego Garcia

text: The 1967 survey, published by the Smithsonian is used as the most authoritative baseline for more recent research. These studies indicate the vegetation of the island may be changing rapidly. For example, J. M. W. Topp collected data annually between 1993 and 2003 and found that on the average three new plant species arrived each year, mainly on Diego Garcia. His research added fully a third more species to Stoddart. Topp and Martin Hamilton of Kew Gardens compiled the most recent checklist of vegetation in 2009.


title: Diego Garcia

text: In 1967, Stoddart described the land area of Diego Garcia as having a littoral hedge of "Scaevola taccada", while inland, "Cocos nucifera" (coconut) was the most dominant tree, covering most of the island. The substory was either managed and park-like, with understory less than 0.5 m in height, or consisted of what he called "Cocos Bon-Dieu" – an intermediate story of juvenile trees and a luxuriant ground layer of self-sown seedlings – causing those areas to be relatively impenetrable.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Also, areas of remnant tropical hardwood forest are at the sites of the plantation-era villages, as well as "Casuarina equisetifolia" (iron wood pines) woodlands.


title: Diego Garcia

text: In 1997, the United States Navy contracted a vegetation survey that identified about 280 species of terrestrial vascular plants on Diego Garcia. None of these was endemic, and another survey in 2005 identified just 36 species as "native", meaning arriving without the assistance of humans, and found elsewhere in the world. No terrestrial plant species are of any conservation-related concern at present.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Of the 36 native vascular plants on Diego Garcia, 12 are trees, five are shrubs, seven are dicotyledon herbs, three are grasses, four are vines, and five are ferns.


title: Diego Garcia

text: The 12 tree species are: "Barringtonia asiatica" (fish-poison tree), "Calophyllum inophyllum" (Alexandrian laurel), "Cocos nucifera", "Cordia subcordata", "Guettarda speciosa", "Intsia bijuga", "Hernandia sonora", "Morinda citrifolia", "Neisosperma oppositifolium", "Pisonia grandis", "Terminalia catappa", and "Heliotropium foertherianum". Another three tree species are common, and may be native, but they may also have been introduced by humans: "Casuarina equisetifolia", "Hibiscus tiliaceus", and "Pipturus argenteus".


title: Diego Garcia

text: The five native shrubs are: "Caesalpinia bonduc", "Pemphis acidula", "Premna serratifolia", "Scaevola taccada" (often mispronounced "Scaveola"), and "Suriana maritima".


title: Diego Garcia

text: Also, 134 species of plants are classified as "weedy" or "naturalised alien species", being those unintentionally introduced by man, or intentionally introduced as ornamentals or crop plants which have now "gone native", including 32 new species recorded since 1995, indicating a very rapid rate of introduction. The remainder of the species list consists of cultivated food or ornamental species, grown in restricted environments such as a planter's pot.


title: Diego Garcia

text: All the terrestrial and aquatic fauna of Diego Garcia are protected, with the exception of certain game fish, rats, and cats; hefty fines are levied against violators.


title: Diego Garcia

text: The island is a haven for several types of crustacean; "warrior crabs" ("Cardisoma carnifex") overrun the jungle at night. The extremely large coconut crab or robber crab ("Birgus latro") is found here in large numbers. Because of the protections provided the species on this atoll, and the isolation of the east rim of the atoll, the species is recorded in greater densities there than anywhere else in its range (339 crabs/ha).


title: Diego Garcia

text: No mammal species are native on Diego Garcia, with no record of bats. Other than rats ("Rattus rattus"), all "wild" mammal species are feral descendants of domesticated species. During the plantation era, Diego Garcia was home to large herds of Sicilian donkeys ("Equus asinus"), dozens of horses ("Equus caballus"), hundreds of dogs ("Canis familiaris"), and house cats ("Felis catus"). In 1971, the BIOT Commissioner ordered the extermination of feral dogs following the departure of the last plantation workers, and the program continued through 1975, when the last feral dog was observed and shot. Donkeys, which numbered over 400 in 1972, were down to just 20 individuals in 2005. The last horse was observed in 1995, and by 2005, just two cats were thought to have survived an island-wide eradication program.


title: Diego Garcia

text: The total bird list for the Chagos Archipelago, including Diego Garcia, consists of 91 species, with large breeding populations of 16 species. Although no birds are endemic, internationally important seabird colonies exist. Diego Garcia's seabird community includes thriving populations of species which are rapidly declining in other parts of the Indian Ocean. Large nesting colonies of brown noddies, bridled terns, the lesser noddy, red-footed booby and lesser frigatebirds exist on Diego Garcia.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Other nesting native birds include red-tailed tropicbirds, wedge-tailed shearwaters, Audubon's shearwater, black-naped terns, white terns, striated herons, and white-breasted waterhens. The 680-hectare Barton Point Nature Reserve was identified as an Important Bird Area for its large breeding colony of red-footed boobies.


title: Diego Garcia

text: The island hosts introduced bird species from many regions, including cattle egrets ("Bubulcus ibis"), Indian barred ground dove, also called the zebra dove ("Geopelia striata"), turtle dove ("Nesoenas picturata"), Indian mynah ("Acridotheres tristis"), Madagascar fody ("Foudia madagascariensis"), and chickens ("Gallus gallus").


title: Diego Garcia

text: Currently, three lizards and one toad are known to inhabit Diego Garcia, and possibly one snake. All are believed to have been introduced by human activity. The house gecko ("Hemidactylus frenatus"), the mourning gecko ("Lepidodactylus lugubris"), the garden lizard (an agamid) ("Calotes versicolor"), and the cane toad ("Bufo marinus"). A viable population of a type of blind snake from the family Typhlopidae may be present, probably the brahminy blind snake ("Ramphotyphlops braminus"). This snake feeds on the larvae, eggs, and pupae of ants and termites, and is about the size of a large earthworm.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Diego Garcia provides suitable foraging and nesting habitat for both the hawksbill turtle ("Eretmochelys imbricata") and the green turtle ("Chelonia mydas"). Juvenile hawksbills are quite common in the lagoon and at Barachois Sylvane (also known as Turtle Cove) in the southern part of the lagoon. Adult hawksbills and greens are common in the surrounding seas and nest regularly on the ocean-side beaches of the atoll. Hawksbills have been observed nesting during June and July, and from November to March. Greens have been observed nesting in every month; the average female lays three clutches per season, each having an average clutch size of 113 eggs. Diurnal nesting is common in both species. An estimated 300–700 hawksbills and 400–800 greens nest in the Chagos.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Four reptiles and six cetaceans are endangered and may or may not be found on or around Diego Garcia:


title: Diego Garcia

text: Hawksbill turtle ("Eretmocheyls imbricata") – known; leatherback turtle ("Dermochelys coriacea") – possible; green turtle ("Chelonia mydas") – known; olive ridley turtle ("Lepidochelys oliveacea") – possible; sperm whale ("Physeter macrocephalus") – possible; sei whale ("Balaeonoptera borealis") – possible;


title: Diego Garcia

text: finback whale ("Balaeonoptera physalus") – possible; Bryde's whale ("Balaeonoptera edeni") – possible; blue whale ("Balaeonoptera musculus") – possible; humpback whale ("Megaptera novaeangliae") – possible; southern right whale ("Eubalaena australis") – possible.


title: Diego Garcia

text: British Forces British Indian Ocean Territories (BFBIOT) is the official name for the British Armed Forces deployment at the Permanent Joint Operating Base (PJOB) on Diego Garcia, in the British Indian Ocean Territory. While the naval and airbase facilities on Diego Garcia are leased to the United States, in practice, it operates as a joint UK-US base, with the UK retaining full and continual access. Diego Garcia is strategically located, offering access to East Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The base serves as a staging area for the buildup or resupply of military forces prior to an operation. There are approximately 40–50 British military personnel posted on Diego Garcia, most of them from Naval Party 1002 (NP1002). NP1002 forms the island's civil administration.


title: Diego Garcia

text: During the Cold War era, following the British withdrawal from East of Suez, the United States was keen to establish a military base in the Indian Ocean to counter Soviet influence and establish American dominance in the region and protect its sea-lanes for oil transportation from the Middle East. The United States saw the atoll as the "Malta of the Indian Ocean" equidistant from all points. The value has been proven many times, with the island providing an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" for the United States during the Iranian revolution, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Operation Desert Fox, Operation Enduring Freedom, and Operation Iraqi Freedom. In the contemporary era, the atoll continues to play a key role in America's approach to the Indian Ocean as a flexible forward military hub that can facilitate a range of offensive activities.


title: Diego Garcia

text: The United States military facilities on Diego Garcia have been known informally as Camp Justice and, after renaming in July 2006, as Camp Thunder Cove. Formally, the base is known as Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia (the US activity) or Permanent Joint Operating Base (PJOB) Diego Garcia (the UK's term).


title: Diego Garcia

text: United States military activities in Diego Garcia have caused friction between India and the United States in the past. Political party CPI(m) in India has repeatedly called for the military base to be dismantled, as they saw the United States naval presence in Diego Garcia as a hindrance to peace in the Indian Ocean. In recent years, relations between India and the United States have improved dramatically. Diego Garcia was the site of several naval exercises between the United States and Indian navies held between 2001 and 2004.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Recent construction in support of US military activities on Diego Garcia has included Black Construction/Mace International JV building a 34-metre antenna facility (expected completed by April 2021) and two new 13-metre radomes (expected completed by February 2021); and SJC-BVIL moving underground the overhead power and telephone lines that run from the Navy ammunition area to the Air Force ammunition area along DG1 (expected completed by September 2022).


title: Diego Garcia

text: Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia provides Base Operating Services to tenant commands located on the island. The command's mission is "To provide logistic support to operational forces forward deployed to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf AORs in support of national policy objectives." KBR has run base operations support services at Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia.


title: Diego Garcia

text: The atoll shelters the ships of the United States Marine Pre-positioning Squadron Two. These ships carry equipment and supplies to support a major armed force with tanks, armoured personnel carriers, munitions, fuel, spare parts and even a mobile field hospital. This equipment was used during the Persian Gulf War, when the squadron transported equipment to Saudi Arabia.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Five of these vessels carry supplies for the US Marine Corps sufficient to support a Marine Air-Ground Task Force for 30 days: USNS "Button", USNS "Kocak", USNS "Lopez", USNS "Stockham", and USNS "Fisher".


title: Diego Garcia

text: Prior to 2001, COMPSRON 2 consisted of up to 20 ships, including four Combat Force Ships which provided rapid-response delivery of equipment to ground troops in the United States Army. Three are lighter aboard ships (LASH) which carry barges called lighters that contain Army ammunition to be ferried ashore: MV "American Cormorant", SS "Green Harbour", (LASH), SS "Green Valley", (LASH), MV "Jeb Stuart", (LASH). There were logistics vessels to service the rapid delivery requirements of the United States Air Force, United States Navy and Defense Logistics Agency. These included container ships for Air Force munitions, missiles and spare parts; a 500-bed hospital ship, and floating storage and offloading units assigned to Military Sealift Command supporting the Defense Logistics Agency, and an offshore petroleum discharge system (OPDS) tanker. Examples of ships are MV "Buffalo Soldier", MV "Green Ridge", pre-position tanker USNS "Henry J. Kaiser", and tanker USNS Potomac (T-AO-181).


title: Diego Garcia

text: The United States Air Force operates a High Frequency Global Communications System transceiver site located on the south end of the atoll near the GEODSS station. The transceiver is operated remotely from Andrews Air Force Base and Grand Forks Air Force Base and is locally maintained by NCTS FE personnel.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Naval Computer and Telecommunications Station Far East Detachment Diego Garcia operates a detachment in Diego Garcia. This detachment provides base telephone communications, base network services (Local Network Services Center), pier connectivity services, and an AN/GSC-39C SHF satellite terminal, operates the Hydroacoustic Data Acquisition System, and performs on-site maintenance for the remotely operated Air Force HF-GCS terminal.


title: Diego Garcia

text: Naval Security Group detachment Diego Garcia was disestablished on 30 September 2005. Remaining essential operations were transferred to a contractor. The large AN/AX-16 High Frequency Radio direction finding Circularly Disposed Antenna Array has been demolished, but the four satellite antenna radomes around the site remain .


title: Diego Garcia

text: The island was one of 33 designated emergency landing sites worldwide for the NASA Space Shuttle. None of these facilities were ever used throughout the life of the shuttle programme.


title: Diego Garcia

text: All consumable food and equipment are brought to Diego Garcia by sea or air, and all non-biodegradable waste is shipped off the island as well. From 1971 to 1973, United States Navy LSTs provided this service. Beginning in 1973, civilian ships were contracted to provide these services. From 2004 to 2009, the US-flagged container ship MV "Baffin Strait", often referred to as the "DGAR shuttle", delivered 250 containers every month from Singapore to Diego Garcia. The ship delivered "more than 200,000 tons of cargo to the island each year". On the return trip to Singapore, it carried recyclable metals.


title: Diego Garcia

text: In 2004, TransAtlantic Lines outbid Sealift Incorporated for the transport contract between Singapore and Diego Garcia. The route had previously been serviced by Sealift Inc.'s "MV Sagamore", crewed by members of American Maritime Officers and Seafarers' International Union. TransAtlantic Lines reportedly won the contract by approximately 10 percent, representing a price difference of about US$2.7 million. The "Baffin Straits" charter ran from 10 January 2005, to 30 September 2008, at a daily rate of US$12,550.


title: Jötunn

text: A ' (also jotun; in the normalised scholarly spelling of Old Norse, ' ; ; plural '/' ) or, in Old English, ' (plural ') is a type of supernatural being in Germanic mythology. In Norse mythology, they are often contrasted with gods (Æsir and Vanir) and other non-human figures, such as dwarfs and elves, although the groupings are not always mutually exclusive. The entities themselves are referred to by several other terms, including ', ' (or ) and if male and ' or ' if female. The typically dwell across boundaries from the gods and humans in lands such as .


title: Jötunn

text: The are frequently attested throughout the Old Norse record, with also featuring in the Old English epic poem "Beowulf". The usage of the terms is dynamic, with an overall trend that the beings become portrayed as less impressive and more negative as Christianity becomes more influential. Although the term "giant" is sometimes used to gloss the word "" and its apparent synonyms in some translations and academic texts, are not necessarily notably large.


title: Jötunn

text: The terms for the beings also have cognates in later folklore such as the British Yotun and Danish which can share some common features such as being turned to stone in the day and living on the periphery of society.


title: Jötunn

text: Old Norse (also ) and Old English developed from the Proto-Germanic masculine noun . Philologist Vladimir Orel says that semantic connections between with Proto-Germanic ('to eat') makes a relation between the two nouns likely. Proto-Germanic is reconstructed from Old Norse 'consuming', Old English 'voracious, gluttonous', and Old High German 'greedy'. The word is cognate with , an archaic word for "giant". Old Norse and Old High German derive from the Proto-Germanic masculine noun . Orel observes that the Old Saxon adjective 'enormous' is likely also connected. Old Norse , Old English , and Old High German 'devil, evil spirit' derive from the Proto-Germanic masculine noun , itself derived form Proto-Germanic , which is etymologically connected to Sanskrit - 'strong, powerful, rich'. Several terms are used specifically to refer to female entities that fall into this wider category, including (plural ), (plural ) and (plural ).


title: Jötunn

text: The cognates (ON) and (OE), and (ON) and (OE) have been equated by scholars such as J. R. R. Tolkien and Rudolf Simek, with the word being used to describe the being when in either Old Norse or Anglo-Saxon mythology respectively.


title: Jötunn

text: In the Eddas, are beings typically with similar power to the gods and may also be referred to by the negative terms and . The harmful nature of is also described in the Icelandic and Norwegian rune poems, where they are identified for causing strife to women. Despite the terms used to refer to male and female often being glossed as 'giant' and 'giantess' respectively, in Eddic sources they are often not described as notably large and are thus sometimes anglicised or left untranslated in translations and academic texts. Descriptions of the appearance of are uncommon however the progenitor of the is described as having the form of a man. Some female are described as being beautiful, such as Gerðr and Hymir's partner while others are described as monstrous and having many heads. Some dwarfs are described as such as Regin and Fáfnir, while in Alvíssmál, the eponymous dwarf is noted for having the likeness of a .


title: Jötunn

text: As the influence of Christianity grew, became demonised and typically portrayed as less intelligent, easier to outwit and more monstrous, as is common with giants in later Germanic folklore. In some later sagas, such as Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss, are clearly distinct from however in others the terms are used interchangeably, albeit with an overall trend that have begun to be seen negatively relative to .


title: Jötunn

text: In a stanza of "Völuspá hin skamma" (found in the poem "Hyndluljóð") all descend from Ymir. Gylfaginning elaborates on this, describing that the primordial Ymir formed in the warm waters that arose in Ginnungagap when the rime of Niflheim was melted by the heat of Muspelheim. He lay there asleep, fed by milk from Auðumbla, whereupon from his left armpit he sweated a male and a female, and his legs begat a son with one another. Together, these children became the ancestors of all other .


title: Jötunn

text: Later, he was killed by the first gods, resulting in a flood of Ymir's blood, in which all drowned except Bergelmir and his family, who survive this event by way of sailing upon a . This has been linked to a runic inscription on a sword hilt in Beowulf which describes the being killed in an ancient flood and has been proposed to derive from Germanic and wider Indo-European mythology.


title: Jötunn

text: According to Gylfaginning, after Ymir was killed, his body was wrought into the world and a sea surrounded it. The gods then gave the surviving families lands along the shore to settle, placing them in the periphery. Ymir's brows were then used to build Midgard and protect it from the due to their known aggression.