Coastal Area 14604 Adjacent waters of Kikaijima Island

Basic Information References

Reason(s) for selection Criteria

Characteristics References

These are the waters in the vicinity of Kikaijima Island. Thanks to its site as the island in the Ryukyu Islands closest to the marine trench, it has the most elevated coast among the islands in this region, and a coastal terrace has been formed around the island's perimeter by coral reefs since the Quaternary period. Worldwide, such coral-reef coastal terraces formed over a lengthy period across geological eras can be seen only in a few sites, including Papua New Guinea, Barbados in the West Indies, and here at Kikaijima Island. These terraces include well-preserved coral fossils, which show that the species that formed the terraces differ very little from those growing around the island today. In this way, these are very important waters in that the reef-building coral that lives in the vicinity of Kikaijima Island together with the reef-building coral fossils on land are unique from both geological and a geomorphological points of view (Webster, 1998; Sugihara et al., 2003).