Submerged coral reefs in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia

Maintenance of fish diversity on disturbed coral reefs

“…The time scale for erosion of the actual reef framework may be hundreds or even thousands of years, though increasing ocean acidification may expedite this process (Hoegh-Guldberg et al 2007). Nonetheless, ancient reefs retain facets of reef topography, even though coral cover and reef accretion has been negligible since the late quaternary (Harris et al 2004). Similarly, reefs founded on granitic boulders retain some structural complexity even after extensive coral mortality and erosion of carbonate structures .…”

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...…”

Episodes of reef growth at Lord Howe Island, the southernmost reef in the southwest Pacific

“…Submerged reefs at similar depths are found between Cairns and Townsville and occur south as far as the Pompey Reefs in the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef (Hopley, in press). Recently, hitherto uncharted submerged coral reefs at this water depth have been reported from the Gulf of Carpentaria (Harris et al, 2004). However, the occurrence of the Lord Howe shelf reefs at the latitudinal limit to reef growth is remarkable; reefs would be expected to be very poorly developed or absent as a result of the cooler water temperatures anticipated when sea level was lower, a central argument of Daly's marginal seas.…”