Lighthouse Reef
Our day began with a brief tropical rain shower, washing the world clean and then departing, leaving us suspended between blue skies and a turquoise sea. We were moored just off Half Moon Caye, a fragment of coconut-fringed beach where the great ring of coral known as Lighthouse Reef rises above the waves for a few meters before giving way again to shallows of golden sand which seem to stretch to the horizon. Lighthouse Reef is an atoll, a circular reef surrounding a lagoon, surrounded in turn by a steep drop-off into deep blue waters. There are only a few atolls in the Caribbean and Atlantic, but they are considerably more common in the Pacific where they form around slowly subsiding volcanic islands. And it was in the Pacific that Charles Darwin first elucidated the mechanism of their formation, during his voyage on the Beagle, linking the various types of reefs he observed into a sequence over geologic time periods. In Darwin’s theory, still generally accepted today, fringing reefs close around the shores of an island grow into barrier reefs, separated from the shore by a lagoon, as the island erodes. Finally, an atoll remains when the island has subsided completely beneath the waves, leaving only a ring of reef near the surface. In the Caribbean, atolls have formed on slowly subsiding limestone massifs in a similar fashion.
Thus, atolls are by definition fairly remote and inaccessible places. Far from continental shores, surrounded by deep water, they are often home to pristine reefs, vibrantly healthy ecosystems that suffer little from many of the threats and degradations affecting coral communities today.
In and out of the water, we all felt the special privilege of visiting this oceanic oasis. We strolled under the palms and Zericote trees to an observation platform right in the midst of a breeding colony of Red-footed Boobies and magnificent frigatebirds and snorkeled in the shallows off the golden beach where lovely fish like this Queen Angelfish patrolled among the corals, sea fans and sponges. SCUBA divers dropped into the water right out over the great coral wall of the atoll, hovering weightlessly over an abyss thousands of feet deep, sharing this blue rainbow world with huge groupers and jacks, discovering hidden secrets of the reef like this banded coral shrimp, perched in the crenellations of a giant barrel sponge. Whatever activities we chose, the marine wilderness embraced our explorations and rewarded us with one treasure after another, until the sunset glow brought a close to our day.
Our day began with a brief tropical rain shower, washing the world clean and then departing, leaving us suspended between blue skies and a turquoise sea. We were moored just off Half Moon Caye, a fragment of coconut-fringed beach where the great ring of coral known as Lighthouse Reef rises above the waves for a few meters before giving way again to shallows of golden sand which seem to stretch to the horizon. Lighthouse Reef is an atoll, a circular reef surrounding a lagoon, surrounded in turn by a steep drop-off into deep blue waters. There are only a few atolls in the Caribbean and Atlantic, but they are considerably more common in the Pacific where they form around slowly subsiding volcanic islands. And it was in the Pacific that Charles Darwin first elucidated the mechanism of their formation, during his voyage on the Beagle, linking the various types of reefs he observed into a sequence over geologic time periods. In Darwin’s theory, still generally accepted today, fringing reefs close around the shores of an island grow into barrier reefs, separated from the shore by a lagoon, as the island erodes. Finally, an atoll remains when the island has subsided completely beneath the waves, leaving only a ring of reef near the surface. In the Caribbean, atolls have formed on slowly subsiding limestone massifs in a similar fashion.
Thus, atolls are by definition fairly remote and inaccessible places. Far from continental shores, surrounded by deep water, they are often home to pristine reefs, vibrantly healthy ecosystems that suffer little from many of the threats and degradations affecting coral communities today.
In and out of the water, we all felt the special privilege of visiting this oceanic oasis. We strolled under the palms and Zericote trees to an observation platform right in the midst of a breeding colony of Red-footed Boobies and magnificent frigatebirds and snorkeled in the shallows off the golden beach where lovely fish like this Queen Angelfish patrolled among the corals, sea fans and sponges. SCUBA divers dropped into the water right out over the great coral wall of the atoll, hovering weightlessly over an abyss thousands of feet deep, sharing this blue rainbow world with huge groupers and jacks, discovering hidden secrets of the reef like this banded coral shrimp, perched in the crenellations of a giant barrel sponge. Whatever activities we chose, the marine wilderness embraced our explorations and rewarded us with one treasure after another, until the sunset glow brought a close to our day.
