Guam

Just 30 miles long and less than 9 miles wide, Guam provides beautiful and isolated beaches, world-class diving and snorkelling and, for the less adventurous, a variety of cultural and historical sites, just waiting to be explored.

Understand The Geography

Guam, officially the U.S. Territory of Guam, is an island in the Western Pacific Ocean and is an organized unincorporated territory of the United States. Its inhabitants are the Chamorros, who first populated the island approximately 4,000 years ago. It is the largest and southernmost of the Mariana Islands.

The northern part of the island is a forested coralline limestone plateau while the south contains volcanic peaks covered in forest and grassland. A coral reef surrounds most of the island, except in areas where bays exist that provide access to small rivers and streams that run down from the hills into the Pacific Ocean and Philippine Sea.

The island's population is most dense in the northern and central regions. Guam is the southernmost island in the Mariana island chain and is the largest island in Micronesia.

This island chain was created as a result of the colliding of the Pacific and Philippine tectonic plates. The Marianas Trench, a deep subduction zone, lies beside the island chain to the eastern part of the island.

The Challenger Deep, the deepest point on earth, is southwest of Guam at 35,797 feet (10,911 m) deep. The island experiences occasional earthquakes due to being on the edge of the Pacific Plate. In recent years, quakes with epicenters near Guam have had magnitudes ranging from 5.0 to 8.2. Unlike the Anatahan volcano in the northern Marianas, Guam is not volcanically active. However, due to wind direction and proximity, volcanic ash activity does affect Guam from time to time, however, to a lesser degree.

Climate Conditions

The climate is characterized as tropical marine.

The weather is generally warm and humid with little seasonal temperature variation. The mean high temperature is 86°F (30 °C) and mean low is 76°F (24 °C) with an average annual rainfall of 86 inches (2,180 mm).

The dry season runs from December through June. The remaining months constitute the rainy season. The highest risk of typhoons is during October and November.

An average of three tropical storms and one typhoon pass within 180 nautical miles (330 km) of Guam each year.