The Lord Howe seamount chain on the western margin of Zealandia some 580 km off the east coast of Australia provides a suitable habitat for the growth of the southernmost coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean. The shelves around Middleton Reef, Lord Howe Island and Balls Pyramid represent carbonate depositional environments where calcareous microfossils are common and generally well preserved. While many of the organisms were originally carried to the islands by an offshoot from the East Australian Current, thus having many species in common with eastern Australia, the islands also exhibit a number of endemic species that have evolved locally over the last 6.5 million years.
The islands are now home to rich and well diversified foraminiferal, ostracod and micro-molluscan fauna, which have not been fully documented previously. This book provides an atlas of the microfossils from lagoonal, beach, shallow near-shore and deeper shelf environments around Middleton Reef, Lord Howe Island and Ball
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The Australian islands flying under the radar
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Lord Howe Island and Balls Pyramid are located at the latitudinal limit of coral reef formation in the Tasman Sea, with the fringing reef on the western margin of Lord Howe Island considered to be the southernmost coral reef in the Pacific. An extensive submerged fossil reef occurs on the shelf around Lord Howe Island. Mapping of the shelf surrounding Balls Pyramid, 24 km south of Lord Howe Island, has revealed a comparable submerged mesophotic reef system in 30–50 m water depth supporting scattered live coral colonies. Radiocarbon dating of coral extracted from limestone cores on the fossil reef reveals that accretion occurred during the early Holocene (10,100–8800 cal. Years BP), concurrent with the first phase of Holocene accretion around Lord Howe Island. The timing of fossil coral growth on the shelves of the two islands indicates that the reefs have been drowned by rising sea level. The fossil reef around Balls Pyramid is a give-up reef that was unable to keep pace with sea l