Patrick D. Nunn,
Professor of Oceanic Geoscience,
The University of the South Pacific
and
Adjunct Senior Fellow,
The Australian National University
This book seeks to draw attention to the landscapes of Pacific islands, their origins and physical development. Although it uses examples from throughout the Pacific, it focuses on the islands of the southwest Pacific: those contained within a triangle whose corners lie in New Caledonia, the Marshall Islands, and the southern Cook Islands. This area covers more than 10 x 106 km2 or some 2% of the earth's surface. I believe it is the first book on such a subject in this region.
This book makes no pretence to be balanced in the sense of laying equal emphasis on all parts of this vast region or of staying strictly within its boundary. Rather, the book attempts a general introduction to the complex and poorly known physical characteristics of the region, as exemplified by case studies of various island groups, mostly within Fiji, Samoa and Tonga.
Fiji receives special emphasis in the book because that country's land area is large compared to most Pacific island nations and because the Fiji archipelago contains a great variety of island types - for example, high and low volcanic islands as well as high and low limestone islands - whereas in other island nations only one island type is dominant. Thus, for examples, it is hoped that the discussion of high volcanic islands in Fiji given here will have some relevance for Solomon Islands and Samoa just as the discussion of low limestone islands is pertinent to Tuvalu and the Tokelau group.
This book also concentrates on Fiji because, in geoscientific terms, it is an area of controversy within the region. Whereas nations such as Tonga, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea are all in classic island-arc situations, and island groups such as the Samoas, Hawaii, Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Cook Islands and most of French Polynesia are all in island chains (whose origin can be explained by the hot-spot hypothesis), Fiji lies astride a boundary or boundaries between the Pacific and Indo-Australian (and maybe smaller) plates and contains island groups of varying origins including island arcs and oceanic central volcanoes.
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