23/12/2004: "KAPINGAMARANGI ATOLL ...........the 'weather-side'."

Below the bottom shelved away into thousands of meters depth at a 45 degree angle. Water visibility about 70 meters horizontal, and maybe 100 meters or more vertical visibility. The max.

Atolls are thought to be slowly sinking extinct volcanoes with tiny islands formed around the mantle on the surface.

As the atoll sinks slowly, live coral keeps growing nearer the surface. Without the coral growth, the islands would be subjected to erosion and may wash away. That's the theroy. The last thing these places need are hoards of hungry crown-of-thorns starfish destroying live coral, or thousands of tourists also causing problems.

More Than a Living:
Fishing and the Social Order on a Polynesian Atoll
Michael D. Lieber
Westview Press 1994
A book review by Danny Yee - © 1994 http://dannyreviews.com/
Kapingamarangi atoll is among the most extreme environments on Earth. It sits at the top of a kilometre high sea mountain in the middle of the Pacific, is almost five hundred kilometres from the next island, and has a total surface area of just .42 square miles; you can't get much closer to the ocean than that! Not surprisingly, given the environment, fishing is central to life on Kapingamarangi, and the core of More Than a Living is an account of the traditional fishing methods of the Kapinga people of the atoll. Over 80 different kinds of fishing methods are classified and described - when and how they were carried out, who took part, what fish were looked for and which caught, and so on. Despite the detail of this part of the book (and it seems likely to be definitive), I actually found this very interesting, despite (or perhaps because of) my complete ignorance of fishing.

23/12/2004: "KAPINGAMARANGI ATOLL ...........the 'weather-side'."

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