Surf’s Up in South America

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Surf’s up for our Geo Quiz: we are looking for one of the few capital cities in the world with good waves. Foreign surfers who land at this South American city’s airport can be riding the waves within an hour. Ocean currents rolling in from both hemispheres and collide all along the 1,500 miles of coastline – all year round. Download MP3

Slideshow: John Otis’s Surfing Pictures

Guam people ponder their identity

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Thousands of people recently demanded that US forces be moved off the Japanese island of Okinawa, something Washington is loathe to do. But there are plans to move some Okinawa Marines to Guam. Guam is a US territory, but as Mary Kay Magistad reports, plans for the military build-up there have ignited soul-searching about just how American people there feel. Download MP3 (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

• View pictures and read Mary Kay’s story
• On The World: Guam loves Spam
• Mary Kay’s stories from the Island of Yap

Guam awaits the Marines

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The population of Guam is expected to increase by 50 % in the next four years. That’s because the U.S. military plans to redeploy thousands of Marines and their families from the Japanese island of Okinawa. The move could bring an economic boom to the Pacific island but it threatens to strain Guam’s infrastructure as Akiko Fujita reports. Download MP3 (Photo: Johan Burati)

• BBC profile of Guam

Campaigning for Kiribati on climate

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At the UN climate talks in Denmark small island states and poor African nations vulnerable to climate impacts have laid out demands for a legally-binding deal tougher than the Kyoto Protocol. This is opposed by richer developing states such as China, which fear tougher action would curb their growth. One of the concerned island nations is Kiribati. Its Copenhagen delegation is getting some help from British environmental campaigner Alex Randall, who offered his services to poor nations most affected by climate change. Marco Werman talks with Randall. Download MP3 (AP Photo: Katsumi Kasahara)

• BBC coverage of the Copenhagen conference
• Environment coverage on The World

DNA and the Earhart mystery

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There’s a new effort to figure out what happened to Amelia Earhart. The aviation pioneer and her navigator disappeared over the Pacific in 1937. Now a group in Delaware hopes to use DNA testing to determine whether some items found on an uninhabited island in the Pacific belonged to Earhart. Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Richard Gillespie of Tighar, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery.

Geo Quiz answer

For today’s Geo Quiz, we asked what direction you’re travelling in if you’re crossing the Panama by train from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The answer is northwest. Reporter Murray Carpenter recently took the train ride and sent us an audio postcard. Listen