Lanky palms dip over white beaches of powder-fine sand. Decadent villas hover above impossibly warm shallows. All around, sea and air merge into a uniform shade of blue. These are the Fari Islands, the apex of tropical perfection situated near the northern end of the archipelago that makes up the Maldives, one of the ultimate vacation destinations for the world’s wealthiest. Made up of 1,200 specks of land sprinkled over hundreds of miles of Indian Ocean, the Maldives are in fact a series of 55 million-year-old limestone outcroppings perched atop a submerged volcanic plateau. But these islands, and many others...