Barrier Reef Landscape

This is a type of coral reef landscape. A barrier reef is also known as the embankment reef or offshore reef, and it is an embankment-like coral reef around an island or a continent. It is separated from the coast by a deep and wide lagoon or an atoll lake. These reefs are mainly distributed around volcanic islands and in reef seas off the mainland. A typical example is the Great Barrier Reef (2,000 km long, 80 km wide) along the northeastern coast of Australia. This reef is mainly composed of an inner reef attached to the coast and an outer reef outside the atoll lake. The outer reef is approximately 500 m wide, but some can be up to several kilometres wide. The width of the atoll lake can be just wide enough for navigation or up to several kilometres wide. The water is 20–100 m deep (Fig. 11).

Fig. 11

Barrier reef landscape