fringing reef
Noun
Meaning
fringing reef (plural fringing reefs)
(oceanography) A completely shallow coral reef adjacent to a coast.
Synonyms
Examples
It is surrounded by coral beaches and a fringing reef and encloses a mangrove lagoon of around 9 km 2 and open to the sea on one side.
The narrow fringing reef surrounding the island can be a maritime hazard, so there is a day beacon near the old village site.
The terrain is low-lying and sandy: a coral island surrounded by a narrow fringing reef with a slightly raised central area.
However, the remaining corals around Bonaire stayed, resulting in a natural fringing reef system.
Wolf Forstreuter, a GIS specialist who leads the GIS and remote sensing team at SPC, explains that, while the fringing reef of an island may be in full sun, there is often cloud cover hovering over parts of the island.
The corals shifted laterally with each sea-level change, becoming "not a barrier but a fringing reef attached to the edge of the continental shelf" during the "Last Glacial Maximum" about 20,000 years ago, he said.