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Updated: May 16, 2025
From the description now given, we must conclude that the dimensions and structure of fringing-reefs depend entirely on the greater or less inclination of the submarine slope, conjoined with the fact that reef-building polypifers can exist only at limited depths.
Lastly, some reefs are left uncoloured from the want of information respecting them, and some because they are of an intermediate structure between the barrier and fringing classes. I have experienced more difficulty in colouring fringing-reefs than in colouring barrier-reefs, as the former, from their much less dimensions, have less attracted the attention of navigators.
MAURITIUS. The reefs round this island have been described in the chapter on fringing-reefs; coloured red. RODRIGUEZ. The coral-reefs here are exceedingly extensive; in one part they project even five miles from the shore. As far as I can make out, there is no deep-water moat within them; and the sea outside does not deepen very suddenly.
Let us then take an island surrounded by fringing-reefs, which offer no difficulty in their structure; and let this island with its reefs, represented by the unbroken lines in the woodcut, slowly subside.
The fringing-reefs on steep coasts are frequently not more than from fifty to one hundred yards in width; they have a nearly smooth, hard surface, scarcely uncovered at low water, and without any interior shoal channel, like that within those fringing-reefs, which lie at a greater distance from the land.
Fringing-reefs, or, as they have been called by some voyagers, shore-reefs, whether skirting an island or part of a continent, might at first be thought to differ little, except in generally being of less breadth, from barrier-reefs.
The three classes, atoll-formed, barrier, and fringing-reefs, together with the modifications just described of the latter, include all the most remarkable coral formations anywhere existing.
Where banks of sediment have accumulated near to the surface, as in parts of the West Indies, they sometimes become fringed with corals, and hence in some degree resemble lagoon-islands or atolls, in the same manner as fringing-reefs, surrounding gently sloping islands, in some degree resemble barrier-reefs. AA, Outer edges of the fringing-reef, at the level of the sea.
For it is probable that sand would accumulate in the hollows formed by tearing out the corals, but not on the broken and projecting stumps, and therefore, in the former case, the fresh growth of the coral might be thus prevented. In the last chapter I remarked that fringing-reefs are almost universally breached, where streams enter the sea.
On what then, I repeat, are these barrier reefs based? Why, with their wide and deep moat-like channels, do they stand so far from the included land? We shall soon see how easily these difficulties disappear. We come now to our third class of Fringing-reefs, which will require a very short notice.
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