David Obura Article with Phoenix Island Maps and Coordinates

[Chris Kuykendall]

Are TIGHAR members familiar with the following article and link given below this paragraph?  I did a Google query...

    obura site:tighar.org

...and only got a Jim Harvey post, with comments by Ric Gillespie, from TIGHAR Forum, October 13, 2000, and a Van Hunn post, from TIGHAR Forum, January 16, 2002.  The posts reference what sound like dives the article author did, possibly in conjunction with a Niku expedition, in June 2000.  Then the article is from eleven years later.

David Obura.  "Coral Reef Structure and Zonation of the Phoenix Islands."  Atoll Research Bulletin (June 2011), pp. 63-82.  From Smithsonian Research Online.
https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/16742/00589.02.pdf

I have a few hundred of Earhart-mystery online bookmarks I'm cleaning up.  I'm just now determining the June month of the article, which comes from the first (Research Gate) of two URLs (also Academia) from which the article can be downloaded, although in the course of the cleanup the direct link above (Smithsonian Research Online), without having to do a download, has proven to be much handier.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289007464_Coral_Reef_Structure_and_Zonation_of_the_Phoenix_Islands

https://www.academia.edu/2677149/Coral_reef_structure_and_zonation_of_the_Phoenix_Islands

Anyway, the virtue of the Obura article is that it has maps of and various coordinates for the several Phoenix Islands.  The only slight drawback is that the latitudes and longitudes that come with the maps are in minutes and decimals of minutes, whereas the latitudes and longitudes in the site location charts at the end are in minutes and seconds with decimals of the seconds.  So a little arithmetic is required to reconcile the map and chart coordinates.

About three times now, I'd tried to use the Nikumaroro coordinates, for which there are several Nikumaroro locations, coupled with Howland coordinates and two latitude-longitude tools...

https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/gccalc.shtml

https://forest.moscowfsl.wsu.edu/fswepp/rc/milatcon.html

... and coupled with some mile/nautical mile or vice versa conversions I'm not very good at, to try to make sense of some (any!?) of the curious numbers in Betty's Notebook (in a few cases guessing at what she might have written wrong, from mistaken number hearing or mistaken numeral transposing).  Pretty much all I've ended up accomplishing, doing the three tries several months apart from one another, is to repeatedly confuse myself and to mystify what if anything I came up with in the previous try or the one before that.