Cay Sal Bank, Bahamas — A partially drowned carbonate platform

Evolution of the Northern Nicaragua Rise during the Oligocene–Miocene: Drowning by environmental factors

“…Because of the lower growth rate of sponge-algal communities, these platforms have failed to keep up with sea-level rise, and as a result are covered by 20-40 m of water. Because neritic carbonate production decreases rapidly with water depth, the submerged shelves and banks of the NNR were considered to be either bdrownedQ or bincipiently drownedQ (Hine and Steinmetz, 1984). However, recent studies have shown that these carbonate shelves and banks on the NNR produce a large volume of neritic metastable carbonate sediment (fine-grained biogenic aragonite and magnesian calcite) much of which is exported offbank Droxler et al, 1991;Droxler, 1991, 1993).…”

The occurrence, acoustic characteristics, and significance of submerged reefs on the continental shelf edge and upper slope, northern South China Sea

“…Previous studies have shown that there are also submerged reefs in many tropical island surroundings and continental shelves, such as the Caribbean Sea (Macintyre,1972;Lighty et al, 1978;Fairbanks, 1989;Hubbard et al, 1990;Blanchon et al, 2002;Jarrett et al, 2005), the Seychelles Islands (Stoddart, 1971), Madagascar (Pichon, 1977;Guilcher, 1988), the Bahamas Islands (Hine and Steinmetz, 1984), the edge of the western Indian continental shelf (Wagle et al, 1994;Colonna et al, 1996;Vora et al, 1996;Dullo et al, 1998;Rao et al, 2003) in the Indian Ocean, Papua New Guinea (Guilcher, 1988;Galewsky et al, 1996), the Fiji Islands (Guilcher, 1988), the Hawaiian Islands (Veeh, 1966;Ku et al, 1974;Szabo et al, 1994;Muhs and Szabo, 1994;Muhs, 2002;Webster et al, 2004Webster et al, , 2010Hearty et al, 2007), the outer edge of the Florida continental shelf (Lighty, 1977), and the Gulf of Carpentaria (Harris et al, 2004) and the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) (Veeh and Veevers, 1970;Harris and Davies, 1989) in Australia in the Pacific Ocean. These submerged reefs in the continental shelves, such as the 1300 km-long submerged reefs distributed on the outer edge of the western Indian continental shelf (Vora et al, 1996), were mainly formed during the last glacial period, whereas the submerged reefs around oceanic volcanic islands, such as the Hawaiian Island of Lanai (Webster et al, 2010), have longer formation histories Compared with modern coral reefs, submerged coral reefs not only reflect the shelf...…”

Submerged coral reefs in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia

“…But there exists also an unknown number of submerged coral reefs, below the sea surface and often invisible to satellite imagery or air photography. Such submerged reefs were difficult to detect prior to the advent of multibeam sonar systems and consequently they have been documented in only a few studies from the Gulf of Papua, Great Barrier Reef (GBR), Indian Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, and the Bahamas (Macintyre, 1972;Hine and Steinmetz, 1984;Carter and Johnson, 1986;Harris and Davies, 1989;Vora and Almeida, 1990;Gardner et al, 2001;Harris et al, 2002). Here, we report the unexpected discovery of submerged reefs in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia (Fig.…”