ABSTRACT
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (the Reef) is one of the world’s most striking natural features from the perspectives of biodiversity, scale and visual appeal (Hundloe, Neumann and Halliburton 1988). Estimates of its age range from as recent as 50,000–100,000 years (Bowen 1994) to 30 million years (Coleman 1990). Spanish explorers were the first Europeans to encounter the Reef in the early seventeenth century (Lawrence, Kenchington and Woodley 2002). It is the world’s most extensive reef system and incorporates three major elements, namely the fringe reef (along the shore), ribbon reef (long thin reef systems found north of Cairns and popular with divers and snorkellers), and platform reef (tall systems offthe continental shelf and the most common). It may be divided into three regions – the inner reef, the outer reef and the Island reefs, which are a mix of inner and outer sites in relation to the coast. It covers 348,700 km2 (134,633 square miles) – about 1.4 times the size of the United Kingdom – with most of the area administered by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA). The Reef is actually a system of reefs, islands and cays extending for more than 2,000 kilometres (1,250 miles) along the Queensland continental shelf from the Tropic of Capricorn to the tip of Cape York (Mylne 2005: 1). Built from coral polyps and forming part of the Indo-Pacific reef system, it is the world’s largest and most complex living structure (Colfelt 2004, Zell 2006). At its southern end the Reef lies up to 300 kilometres offshore, but it is closer to the coastline along its northern section.
