published in 1994 by Blackwell, 418 pages
Being the first of a series about The Natural Environment, this book can be found in lots of libraries, especially university ones. It was perhaps the first-ever book to try and systematically describe the nature of islands found in the middle of oceans, how they form there, why so many are volcanically and seismically active compared to continents. And that, I suppose, is what makes it special.
This book had ten chapters (see the list), the first focused on trying to define an island, a more thorny question than you might suppose, given that every piece of dry land on Earth is surrounded by ocean but that we don’t think of Budapest or Beijing as island cities. Of course this book focuses on ‘oceanic’ islands, ones that are found within the oceans, the questions of why and how such islands form being discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 respectively.
Not much has changed in our understanding of these kinds of issues since this book was published in 1994 so the accounts of island tectonics (land-level changes), climates and landscapes in Chapters 4-6 still seems relevant. The accounts of low coral-reef islands in Chapter 7 and the effects of sea-level changes on these in Chapter 8 are probably most out of date, as to a lesser extent are the reviews of island biotas and prospects in the last two chapters.
For me, one of the great things about Oceanic Islands are the innumerable illustrations, mostly drawn by the publishers from my rough sketches. There are also loads of black-and-white photos, many of them my own. The one on the left below shows Kalolo Hunt providing a scale for emerged Porites microatolls at ‘Aoa on Tutuila Island (American Samoa). These fossil corals were living around seven hundred years ago before a small fall in sea level, marking the start of the Little Ice Age, left them exposed.
The book also places a lot of emphasis on how processes of natural island evolution upset human enterprise, one example that featured being the AD 1692 Earthquake at Port Royal in Jamaica, at the time, would you believe, the largest city in the Americas. The map below shows how much land disappeared – in a matter of minutes – while the one below is a contemporary sketch, suggesting that earthquake-induced liquefaction was the likeliest culprit for the disappearance of the city.
In the section about how islands form, I included a sketch (below) of the growth of Usu Volcano on Hokkaido Island (Japan) redrawn, amazingly, from a series of sketches on a grimy window by a village postmaster with a front-row view. As you can see, it wasn’t much of a view on 1st January 1944 but, after 618 days, it was spectacular.
And a final example is that of St Helena Island in the South Atlantic Ocean, which I had visited about a decade before I started writing Oceanic Islands. It was a two-week boat ride from Bristol (UK) in those days, before St Helena had an airport. The landscape blew me away with its starkness, its raw beauty. I included two shots in the book.
The shot on the left must have been similar to that seen in July 1836 by Charles Darwin, which led him to describe St Helena as rising “like a huge castle from the ocean”. The photo on the left is of the phonolitic volcanic neck named Lot’s Wife. It told Darwin that different volcanic rock types could be erupted at different times through the same volcano, something we now attribute to fractional crystallization.
*****
This 411-page book was well reviewed. One reviewer, writing in the journal Geography, said that
“This book is the first of a series of twelve promised … If the remaining eleven are as readable and thought-provoking as this one is, then the cause of geography and physical geography in particular, will have been enhanced.”
while a review in the journal Nature concluded that
“The spread of subject matter is remarkably diverse and the geographical range global … On the textbook spectrum from the encyclopaedic to the slim thematic volume, the book sits at the specialized end, although often only in the case studies does the complexity of disentangling tectonic, eustatic and climatic factors become totally clear … The book is valuable as an entry point to a large and scattered literature.”
And which author would not be encouraged by a review like that in GeoJournal which stated that
“This excellent monograph opens a new series by Blackwell, which is meant to deal with broad topics of general import, shunning the narrow specialization of a large part of the geographical literature. This first work certainly fulfills outstandingly the avowed purpose.”
These days, this book is not available new, only secondhand from places like AbeBooks, one of my favourite used booksellers. More reviews of Oceanic Islands are here.