Fairway Rock is located in the Bering Strait, 17 miles (27 km) offshore from Cape Prince of Wales at the western end of the Seward Peninsula, about 11 miles (18 km) south-southeast of Diomede and 18 miles (29 km) west of Wales, Alaska. The rock is 534 feet (163 m) high, square-headed, and steep-sided. The Bering Strait was part of the Bering Land Bridge, now shallowly submerged by the Bering and Chukchi seas, but was subaerially exposed during the glacial episodes of the Pleistocene Epoch (about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago). The first people to inhabit the region were likely also among the first people to arrive in North America. In 1648, the Russian fur trader Semen I. Dezhnev led an expedition that crossed from north to south through the strait, but apparently no chart was produced. The discovery of the strait is credited to the Danish Captain Vitus Bering owing to the official charts and logs from his 1728 Russian government-sponsored expedition. Fairway Rock was first mapped by Captain James Cook in 1778. It was named “Fairway” in 1826, by Captain Frederick William Beechey of the Royal Navy, because it is an important navigation guide to the preferred eastern channel through the Bering Strait. Beechey also recorded its Iñupiaq name as “Oo-ghee-ak”. It was mentioned in the accounts of John Muir’s voyage aboard the Corwin in 1881, and by Roald Amundsen aboard the Gjøa in 1906.
Most of the Seward Peninsula is underlain by rocks of the Nome Complex that were part of a late Proterozoic to early Paleozoic continental margin. Remnants of that margin are also present on the Chukotsk Peninsula, across Bering Strait, 53 miles (85 km) west of the Seward Peninsula. The Nome Complex is a metamorphic terrane likely derived from an early Paleozoic Arctic Alaska–Chukotka terrane with an exotic Laurentia origin. During the mid-Cretaceous (about 145 million to 66 million years ago); a protracted period of magmatism began on Seward Peninsula and lasted until the end of the Cretaceous. The islands offshore of the Seward Peninsula in the Bering Sea such as King Island, Sledge Island near Nome, Fairway Rock, and Little Diomede, are granitic plutons that formed during the Cretaceous and are extremely resistant to erosion. Fairway Rock is a porphyritic hypersthene-bearing granite, with orthoclase crystals up to 4 inches (10 cm) long that are locally aligned in a fabric. Biotite from Fairway Rock yielded a potassium–argon biotite age of 111 million years ago, similar to ages of intrusive rocks on Seward Peninsula. Little Diomede Island, King Island, and Sledge Island are biotite-hornblende quartz monzonites or granites of unknown age.
The Bering Strait is the only oceanographic connection between the Pacific and Arctic oceans, and therefore plays an outsized role in regulating global ocean circulation by limiting the mostly northward flow of Pacific waters into the Arctic ecosystems of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. This northward flow through the strait lowers salinity, melts ice, and regulates climate by enhancing stratification of both the Arctic and North Atlantic oceans. Ocean currents north of Fairway Rock have been studied as a real-world example of a Von Kármán vortex street. In fluid dynamics, a vortex street is a repeating pattern of swirling vortices. The ocean currents cause vertical mixing of the water column resulting in food production. The Bering Strait region provide habitat for many whale species, including bowhead whales, beluga whales, gray whales, orcas, and humpback whales. Other marine mammals that use the Bering Strait include walruses; bearded, spotted and ringed seals; and polar bears. Fairway Rock is an important nesting site for seabirds, most notably the least and crested auklet, and is part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. The region is also a seasonal home to some of the largest concentrations of breeding seabirds in North America: an estimated 12 million seabirds nest and forage in and around the Bering Strait. The region includes a number of designated Important Bird Areas, which are places of essential habitat for specific bird species. Birds that gather in the Bering Strait include puffins, murres, red phalaropes, and black-legged kittiwakes. Read more here and here. Explore more of Fairway Rock and Bering Strait here: