Caroline Island was renamed Millennium Island after becoming an early place to enter the year 2000.
Caroline Island is a coral atoll in the central Pacific Ocean and part of Kiribati. In 1994, Kiribati shifted the International Date Line eastward around several of its islands. The change placed the Line Islands, including Caroline Island, on the calendar side that would experience the next day first.
The island was renamed Millennium Island in 1999 in anticipation of the new millennium. It received international attention on January 1, 2000, when its location near the date line made it one of the earliest inhabited or otherwise recognized places to reach that date.
The naming created memorable headlines, but it did not mean that the island had a large permanent population or that it was the first point on Earth in every possible sense. The International Date Line is an agreed civil boundary rather than a perfectly straight natural line, and the exact first locations depend on how “place” and inhabited status are defined.