The corals and coral reefs of Easter Island—A preliminary look

Easter Island sits in geographic isolation in the southern Pacific Ocean at latitude 27° 8’ S and longitude 109°20’ W, nearly 4500 km west of Chile (Fig. 1). It is a small island near the western end of a chain of volcanoes that are related to hot-spot activity dating beyond 3.5 million years before present. The small island of Sala y Gomez to the east and a series of submerged platforms are an extension of a volcanic lineament along the edge of the Nazca Plate (Kruse, et al., 1997; Newman and Foster, 1983