from Port Moresby (Papuan Barrier Reef, partly drowned)
to the tip of the Archipel de la Louisiade (Calvados Barrier
Reef, a 570 km long reef around Suddest Island), an
uninterrupted stretch of morphologically diverse barrier
reefs (Andréfouët et al., 2006b). This region also includes
faro-barrier reefs (Figure 1). Other spectacular Pacific
Ocean barrier reefs are the Fijian Great Sea Reef in the
north of Vanua Levu Island (410 km) and the barrier reefs
surrounding Palau Island (390 km). Pacific Islands from
Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia display many barrier reefs of few tens of kilometers long, some that can
be typically Darwinian (e.g., Bora Bora or Mangareva in
French Polynesia, Aitutaki in the Cook Islands).
Drilling in barrier reefs
Only a few cores have been retrieved from the large barrier
reef tracts, including in New Caledonia (Coudray, 1976;
a
b
d
c
15 km
15 km
30 km
30 km
Barrier Reef (Ribbon Reef), Figure 2 Examples of Pacific Ocean barrier reefs captured with the Landsat 7 spaceborne sensor.
(a) A section of the Great Sea Reef north of Vanua Levu, Fiji. (b) The barrier reef, partly intertidal, partly drowned that surrounds
Mangareva Island in southeast French Polynesia. (c) A section of the Ribbon Reefs in the north of the Great Barrier Reef, Australia.
(d) A section of the Calvados Barrier Reef in eastern Papua New Guinea.
BARRIER REEF (RIBBON REEF)
105