Yellow tang near Maug Island in Mariana Archipelago - Robert Schroeder, NOAA

In a move generating rare praise from environmentalists, President Bush is to announce today that he is creating three huge new marine reserves in the Pacific Ocean spanning 195,000 square miles - an area the size of Oregon and Washington combined.  

Using his authority under the federal Antiquities Act, the president is designating the areas - one of them spanning the Mariana Trench, the deepest canyon in the Pacific - as Marine National Monuments.  As such, they would be off-limits to deep-sea mining and most fishing.

With this action, Bush has set aside more ocean for conservation than any other president. Environmental groups, which have been critical of other last-minute moves by the administration to relax federal endangered species, forest and pollution laws, hailed the president's move.

Joshua Reichert, managing director of the Pew Environment Group, said in a statement that the White House's "historic action ... protects some of the world's most unique and biologically significant ocean habitat."

The largest of the new marine reserves surrounds the northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. protectorate.  Its 95,000 square miles encompass a boiling deep-ocean pool of liquid sulfur, active mud volcanoes and hydrothermal vents. According to Pew, the waters harbor 19 marine mammal species, including rare beaked whales. The islands are home to many migratory seabirds, as well as giant coconut crabs, threatened fruit bats and an endangered bird that uses the heat from volcanoes to incubate its eggs.

The remote and exotic islands also have a place in US history. Wake and Saipan islands were  bloody battlegrounds during the second World War.

It wasn't a total victory for conservationists, though.  The Los Angeles Times reports that the administration made a concession to commercial fishermen and did not restrict fishing above the Mariana Trench.  It also shrank the size of the reserve and eased the degree of regulation being sought by proponents of the monument.
 

You can find out more about the reserves and see more spectacular photos here.