Geography of New Caledonia
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The geography of New Caledonia<ref>Previously known officially as the "Territory of New Caledonia and Dependencies" (Template:Langx), then simply as the "Territory of New Caledonia" (French: Territoire de la Nouvelle-Calédonie), the official French name is now only Nouvelle-Calédonie (Organic Law of 19 March 1999, article 222 IV — see Template:Cite web). French courts often continue to use the appellation Territoire de la Nouvelle-Calédonie.</ref> (Nouvelle-Calédonie), an overseas collectivity of France located in the subregion of Melanesia, makes the continental island group unique in the southwest Pacific. Among other things, the island chain has played a role in preserving unique biological lineages from the Mesozoic. It served as a waystation in the expansion of the predecessors of the Polynesians, the Lapita culture. Under the Free French it was a vital naval base for Allied Forces during the War in the Pacific.
The archipelago is located east of Australia, north of New Zealand, south of the Equator, and just west of Fiji and Vanuatu. New Caledonia comprises a main island, Grande Terre, the Loyalty Islands, and several smaller islands. Approximately half the size of Taiwan, the group has a land area of Template:Convert. The islands have a coastline of Template:Convert. New Caledonia claims an exclusive fishing zone to a distance of Template:Convert and a territorial sea of Template:Convert from shore.<ref>Kowasch M. and Batterbury, S.P.J. (eds.). 2024. Geographies of New Caledonia-Kanaky: environments, politics and cultures. Springer Open Access. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49140-5</ref>
New Caledonia is one of the northernmost parts of an almost entirely (93%) submerged continent called Zealandia which rifted away from Antarctica between 130 and 85 million years ago (mya), and from Australia 85–60 mya. (Most of the elongated triangular continental mass of Zealandia is a subsurface plateau. New Zealand is a mountainous above-water promontory in its center, and New Caledonia is a promontory ridge on the continent's northern edge.) New Caledonia itself drifted away from Australia 66 mya, and subsequently drifted in a north-easterly direction, reaching its present position about 50 mya.<ref>Boyer & Giribet 2007: 355</ref> Given its long stability and isolation, New Caledonia serves as a unique island refugium—a sort of biological 'ark'—hosting a unique ecosystem and preserving Gondwanan plant and animal lineages no longer found elsewhere.<ref>"New Caledonia has long been considered a Gondwanan refuge where archaic groups have survived for 80Ma." "New Caledonia: a very old Darwinian island?" Philippe Grandcolas,1* Jérôme Murienne, et al., Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2008 October 27; 363(1508): 3309–3317.</ref><ref>a window into the unique evolutionary history of this part of the world. Initially this biota lived along the New Zealand-New Caledonia coast of Gondwana, but following Cretaceous breakup of this southern supercontinent the fossils record terrestrial and marine evolution on and around the New Zealand "ark" set adrift in the Southwest Pacific." See HAYWARD B.W. (2009).- Protecting fossil sites in New Zealand Template:Webarchive.- In: LIPPS J.H. & GRANIER B.R.C. (eds.), PaleoParks – The Protection and conservation of fossil sites worldwide.- Carnets de Géologie / Notebooks on Geology, Brest, 2009</ref><ref>for scholarly usage of the exact term "biological ark" in context of the Gondwanan breakup: "This globally significant ‘biological ark’, is attributed to Australia's long geographic isolation from other parts of the world." "Potential of ecotourism to protect natural remnant areas within the urban environment" Fiona Prince The University of Western Australia, Department of Environmental Engineering, 2002</ref><ref>At the end of Jurassic (135 My), Gondwana started to break apart. The oldest grounds of current New Caledonia were then located on the eastern margin of this continent as part of the Australian block. Towards the end of Cretaceous, about 85 million years ago, this old New Caledonia broke away and so did New Zealand. New-Caledonia was then isolated... As a result, New Caledonia is now a kind of "Jurassic Park" particularly with regards to its vegetation which is highly endemic and which has kept archaic characteristics." Gondwana super-continent. Template:Webarchive</ref><ref>Jean-Jacques Espirat, author of Étude géologique de régions de la Nouvelle Calédonie and member of the Bureau de Recherches Geologiques et Minieres compares it to Noah's Ark: "La Grande Terre de la Nouvelle-Calédonie s'est séparée il y a 70 millions d'années (au Crétacé terminal) du continent de Gondwana (groupant à l'origine les terres qui se sont séparées pour former l'Australie, l'Antarctique, l'Amérique du Sud, l'Inde, Madagascar et l'Afrique). Telle l'Arche de Noé cette Nouvelle Calédonie de la fin du Crétacé embarquait la flore de cette époque." La faune et la flore de Nouvelle-Calédonie. (French)</ref>
Composition
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New Caledonia is made up of a main island, the Grande Terre, and several smaller islands, the Belep archipelago to the north of the Grande Terre, the Loyalty Islands to the east of the Grande Terre, the Isle of Pines to the south of the Grande Terre, the Chesterfield Islands and Bellona Reefs further to the west. Each of these four island groups has a different geological origin:
- The New Caledonia archipelago, which includes Grande Terre, Belep, and the Île des Pins was born as a series of folds of the Earth's mantle between the Permian period (251–299 mya) and the Paleogene and Neogene periods (1.5–66 mya). This mantle obduction created large areas of peridotite and a bedrock rich in nickel.
- The Loyalty Islands, a hundred kilometers to the east, are coral and limestone islands built on top of ancient collapsed volcanoes originating due to subduction at the Vanuatu trench.
- The Chesterfield Islands, Template:Convert to the northwest, are reef outcroppings of the oceanic plateau.
- The Matthew and Hunter Islands, at Template:Convert east, respectively, are volcanic islands that form the southern end of the arc of the New Hebrides.
The Grande Terre is by far the largest of the islands and the only mountainous island. It has an area of Template:Convert, and is elongated northwest–southeast, Template:Convert in length and Template:Convert wide. A mountain range runs the length of the island, with five peaks over Template:Convert. The highest point is Mont Panié at Template:Convert elevation. The total area of New Caledonia is Template:Convert, Template:Convert of those being land.
A territorial dispute exists with regard to the uninhabited Matthew and Hunter Islands, which are claimed by both France (as part of New Caledonia) and Vanuatu.
Zealandian origin
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The New Caledonian archipelago is a microcontinental island chain which originated as a fragment of Zealandia, a nearly submerged continent or microcontinent which was part of the southern supercontinent of Gondwana during the time of the dinosaurs. The Grande Terre group of New Caledonia, with Mont Panié at Template:Convert as its highest point, is the most elevated part of the Norfolk Ridge, a long and mostly underwater arm of the continent.<ref name="teara.govt.nz">Template:Cite web</ref> While they were still one landmass, Zealandia and Australia combined broke away from Antarctica between 85 and 130 million years ago. Australia and Zealandia split apart 60–85 million years ago.<ref name="Te Ara">Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref> Although biologists consider it contrary to the evidence of surviving Gondwanan lineages, geologists consider the logical possibility that Zealandia may have been completely submerged about 23 million years ago.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> While a continent like Australia consists of a large body of land surrounded by a fringe of continental shelf, Zealandia consists almost entirely of continental shelf, with the vast majority, some 93%, submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean.<ref name="teara.govt.nz"/> This viewpoint is not universal. Bernard Pelletier argues that Grande Terre was completely submerged for millions of years, and hence the origin of the flora may not be local in nature, but due to long distance-dispersal.<ref>Pelletier B., 2007. "Geology of the New Caledonia region and its implications for the study of the New Caledonian biodiversity", in: Payri C. E., Richer de Forges B. (eds.) Compendium of marine species of New Caledonia, Doc. Sci. Tech. II7, second edition, IRD Nouméa, pp 19–32.</ref>
Zealandia is Template:Convert in area, larger than Greenland or India, and almost half the size of Australia. It is unusually slender, stretching from New Caledonia in the north to beyond New Zealand's subantarctic islands in the south (from latitude 19° south to 56° south,<ref name="Te Ara"/> analogous to ranging from Haiti to Hudson Bay or from Sudan to Sweden in the Northern Hemisphere). New Zealand is the greatest part of Zealandia above sea level, followed by New Caledonia.<ref name="Te Ara"/>
Given its continental origin as a fragment of Zealandia, unlike many of the islands of the Pacific such as the Hawaiian chain, New Caledonia is not of geographically recent volcanic provenance. Its separation from Australia at the end of the Cretaceous (65 mya) and from New Zealand in the mid-Miocene has led to a long period of evolution in near complete isolation. New Caledonia's natural heritage significantly comprises species whose ancestors were ancient and primitive flora and fauna present on New Caledonia when it broke away from Gondwana millions of years ago, not only species but entire genera and even families are unique to the island, and survive nowhere else.
Since the age of the dinosaurs, as the island moved north due to the effects of continental drift, some geologists assert that it may have been fully submerged at various intervals. Botanists, however, argue that there must have been some areas that remained above sea level, serving as refugia for the descendants of the original flora that inhabited the island when it broke away from Gondwana. The isolation of New Caledonia was not absolute, however. New species came to New Caledonia while species of Gondwanan origin were able to penetrate further eastward into the Pacific Island region.Template:Citation needed
Climate
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The climate of New Caledonia is tropical, modified by southeasterly trade winds. It is hot and humid. Natural hazards are posed in New Caledonia by cyclones, which occur most frequently between November and March. While rainfall in the neighboring Vanuatu islands averages two meters annually, from the north of New Caledonia to the south the rain decreases to a little over Template:Convert. The mean annual temperature drops over the same interval from Template:Convert, and seasonality becomes more pronounced. The capital, Nouméa, located on a peninsula on the southwestern coast of the island normally has a dry season which increases in intensity from August until mid-December, ending suddenly with the coming of rain in January. The northeastern coast of the island receives the most rain, with Template:Convert having been recorded near sea level in Pouébo.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Terrain
[edit]The terrain of Grande Terre consists of coastal plains, with mountains in the interior. The lowest point is the Pacific Ocean, with an elevation of 0 m, and the highest is Mont Panie, with an elevation of Template:Convert.
The Diahot River is the longest river of New Caledonia, flowing for some Template:Convert.<ref name="EB">Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref> It has a catchment area of 620 square kilometres and opens north-westward into the Baie d'Harcourt, flowing towards the northern point of the island along the western escarpment of the Mount Panie.<ref name="EB"/><ref name="UNU">Template:Cite web</ref>
In 1993, 12% of New Caledonian land was used for permanent pasture, with 39% occupied by forests and woodland. In 1991, Template:Convert of the land was irrigated. A current environmental issue is erosion caused by mining exploitation and forest fires.
Biological isolation
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Template:See also Given its geographical isolation since the end of the Cretaceous, New Caledonia is a refugium, in effect a biological "Noah's Ark", an island home to both unique living plants and animals and also to its own special fossil endowment. Birds such as the crested and almost flightless kagu (French, cagou) Rhynochetos jubatus, whose closest relative may be the distantly related sunbittern of South America, and plants such as Amborella trichopoda, the only known member of the most basal living branch of flowering plants, make this island a treasure trove and a critical concern for biologists and conservationists. The island was home to horned fossil turtles (Meiolania mackayi) and terrestrial fossil crocodiles (Mekosuchus inexpectatus) which became extinct shortly after human arrival. There are no native amphibians, with geckos holding many of their niches. The crested gecko (Correlophus ciliatus), thought to have gone extinct, was rediscovered in 1994.<ref name="devosjoli"> Template:Citation </ref> At 14 inches, Leach's giant gecko (Rhacodactylus leachianus), the world's largest<ref name="Ballance, Morris">Allison Ballance and Rod Morris, "Island Magic; wildlife of the south seas", David Bateman publishing, 2003</ref> and a predator of smaller lizards is another native. The only native mammals are four species of bat including the endemic New Caledonia flying fox.<ref>New Caledonia by Leanne Logan, Geert Cole, Lonely Planet, 2001, p 29</ref>
New Caledonia is home to 13 of the 19 extant species of evergreens in the genus Araucaria. The island has been called "a kind of 'Jurassic Park'"<ref>Gondwana super-continent. Template:Webarchive Nouvelle-Calédonie.</ref> because of the archaic characteristics of its highly endemic vegetation. In addition to the basal angiosperm plant genus Amborella, for example, the island is home to more gymnosperm species than any other tropic landmass, with 43 of its 44 conifer species being unique to the island, which is also home to the world's only known parasitic gymnosperm, the rootless conifer Parasitaxus usta.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Given their prehistoric appearance, the dry forests of western New Caledonia were chosen as the location for filming the first episode of the BBC miniseries Walking with Dinosaurs, which was set in the Arizona of the late Triassic.
Mineral wealth
[edit]Template:Main After a formation discovered in Oman in the 1970s, New Caledonia has the planet's largest known outcrop of ultrabasic rock, derived not from the crust, but from an upthrust fold of the more deeply underlying mantle of the earth.<ref>Geology – The massifs of ultrabasic rocks or "massifs miniers" Template:Webarchive New Caledonia</ref> These mineral-rich rocks are a source of nickel, chromium, iron, cobalt, manganese, silver, gold, lead and copper. The toxicity of the mineral-rich soil has helped preserve the endemic vegetation, which has long been adapted to it, from competition from would-be colonizers which find it unsuitable.<ref>La faune et la flore de Nouvelle-Calédonie. (French)</ref>
Human geography
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Before Western contact
[edit]Anthropologically, New Caledonia is considered the southernmost archipelago of Melanesia, grouping it with the more close by islands to its north, rather than its geologically associated neighbour, New Zealand, to the south. The New Caledonian languages, whose speakers are called Kanaks, and the dialects of the Loyalty Islands find their closest relatives in the languages of Vanuatu to the east. Together, these comprise the Southern Oceanic language family, a member of the Oceanic language branch of the Austronesian language family. The Fijian languages, the Māori language of New Zealand, and other Polynesian languages such as Tahitian, Samoan and Hawaiian are cousins of the New Caledonian languages within the Oceanic language family.<ref name="language.psy.auckland.ac.nz">Template:Cite web</ref>
Linguistic analysis using the comparative method provides a detailed family tree of the Austronesian languages to which the native languages of New Caledonia belong.<ref name="language.psy.auckland.ac.nz"/> The Lapita culture, hypothesized to have spoken proto-Oceanic, and defined by its typical style of pottery, originated to the northwest in the Bismarck Archipelago around 1500 BC.<ref>"The Austronesian Dispersal" Pawley, Andrew, Examining the framing/language dispersal hypothesis, Peter Bellwood and Colin Renfrew, eds., McDonald Institute Monographs, 2002, p 254</ref> The earliest known human settlement of New Caledonia, dated to 1240 ±220 BC at the Tiwi rockshelter,<ref>"Lapita and non-Lapita ware during New Caledonia's first millennium of Austronesian settlement" Christophe Sand, p 3, in Le Pacifique de 5000 h 2000 avant le present / The Pacific from 5000 to 2000 BP, Archaeologue, http://horizon.documentation.ird.fr/exl-doc/pleins_textes/pleins_textes_7/divers2/010020743.pdf</ref> is attributed to the Lapitans, who then moved on to Fiji by approximately 900 BC, whence the Polynesian expansion would begin.<ref>Pawley, ibid.</ref>
Since Western contact
[edit]Western colonization of the area began in the 18th century. The British explorer James Cook sighted Grande Terre in 1774 and named it New Caledonia, Caledonia being Latin for Scotland.<ref>Kowasch M. and Batterbury, S.P.J. (eds.). 2024. Geographies of New Caledonia-Kanaky: environments, politics and cultures. Springer Open Access. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49140-5</ref> In 1853, under Napoleon III, the area was made a French colony. The French brought colonial subjects such as Arabs from the Maghreb to settle in the territory. Given its strategic location and that it was unoccupied by Japanese troops it played a vital role under the Free French Forces<ref>"The establishment of Free French rule in New Caledonia and the deportation of the Vichy leaders, meant that the colony was for all practical purposes allied with Australia in the war against Germany" Hasluck: "Clearing a Way to Total War" p 47.</ref> as an Allied Forces naval base during the Second World War.
Today, while French is the official language, 28 indigenous tongues are still spoken. At the 2004 census, 97.0% reported they could speak French, whereas only 0.97% reported that they had no knowledge of French.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In the same census, 37.1% reported that they could speak (but not necessarily read or write) one of the 28 indigenous Austronesian languages.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
At the 1996 census, the indigenous Melanesian Kanak community represented around44.6% of the whole population.<ref name=ethnicity>Template:Cite web</ref> and estimated at over 41% in 2023.<ref>Kowasch M. and Batterbury, S.P.J. (eds.). 2024. Geographies of New Caledonia-Kanaky: environments, politics and cultures. Springer Open Access. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49140-5</ref> They are no longer a majority, their proportion of the population having declined due to immigration and other factors. The rest of the population is made up of ethnic groups that arrived in New Caledonia in the last 150 years: Europeans (34.5%) (predominantly French, with German, British and Italian minorities), Polynesians (Wallisians, Tahitians) (11.8%), Indonesians (2.6%), Vietnamese (1.4%), Ni-Vanuatu (1.2%), and various other groups (3.9%), Tamils, other South Asians, Berbers, Japanese, Chinese, Fijians, Arabs, West Indian (mostly from other French territories) and a small number of ethnic Africans.<ref name=ethnicity />
See also
[edit]Other microcontinental islands:
References
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External links
[edit]- Croixdusud.info Template:Webarchive a site in both English and French including information on the geography, geology, and biodiversity of the area