MPEJ Volume 10, No. 1, 13 pp. Received: Aug 26, 2003. Revised: Jan 25, 2004. Accepted: Jan 29, 2004. C. Liverani Birth of an elliptic island in a chaotic sea ABSTRACT: I consider a one parameter family of area preserving smooth maps evolving from a uniformly hyperbolic situation to developing an elliptic region. I prove that exponentially close to such a family there are maps with positive metric entropy. http://www.maia.ub.es/mpej/Vol/10/1.ps http://www.maia.ub.es/mpej/Vol/10/1.pdf http://www.ma.utexas.edu/mpej/Vol/10/1.ps http://www.ma.utexas.edu/mpej/Vol/10/1.pdf