Eastern Polynesia

Abstract

Eastern Polynesia, comprising five great archipelagoes, the Cook, Austral, Society, Tuamotu (including the Gambier and Pitcairn groups), and Marquesas Islands, plus remote Easter and Sala y Gomez Islands, stretches over a vast range of tropical and subtropical ocean (Fig. 8.1; for Cook Islands, see Fig. 7.1, p. 342). In size, the islands range from tiny Marotiri, a group of elevated rocks, the smallest of them only a few square meters in extent (the most southeastern of the Austral Islands), to Tahiti, the largest and highest, 1042 km2 in area and 2241 m in height. In latitude, the range is from the northern islands of the Marquesas, south of the equator (from about 7° S latitude) to subtropical Rapa and Easter Island (about 27° S). Topographically, the range is from almost perfectly flat atolls to the spirelike peaks of Rapa, Moorea, and Bora Bora and the towering wedge of Orofena in Tahiti.