Coral Reefs; Volcanic Islands; South American Geology — CompleteDarwin, Charles
Science
Coral Reefs; Volcanic Islands; South American Geology — Complete
Darwin, Charles
Beagle Expedition (1831-1836); Coral reefs and islands; Geology -- South America; Islands; Volcanoes
To add to my doubts, immediately on the outside of this
barrier-like reef, _Turneffe, Lighthouse_, and _Glover_ reefs are
situated, and these reefs have so completely the form of atolls, that
if they had occurred in the Pacific, I should not have hesitated about
colouring them blue. _Turneffe Reef_ seems almost entirely filled up
with low mud islets; and the depth within the other two reefs is only
from one to three fathoms. From this circumstance and from their
similarity in form, structure, and relative position, both to the bank
called _Northern Triangles_, on which there is an islet between seventy
and eighty feet, and to _Cozumel_ Island, the level surface of which is
likewise between seventy and eighty feet in height, I consider it more
probable that the three foregoing banks are the worn down bases of
upheaved shoals, fringed with corals, than that they are true atolls,
wholly produced by the growth of coral during subsidence; left
uncoloured.
In front of the eastern _Mosquito_ coast, there are between lat. 12°
and 16° some extensive banks (already mentioned, p. 148), with high
islands rising from their centres; and there are other banks wholly
submerged, both of which kinds of banks are bordered, near their
windward margins, by crescent-shaped coral-reefs. But it can hardly be
doubted, as was observed in the preliminary remarks, that these banks
owe their origin, like the great bank extending from the Mosquito
promontory, almost entirely to the accumulation of sediment, and not to
the growth of corals; hence I have not coloured them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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