A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words 1054 entries

atoll

AT-all or ah-TOLL
A ring-shaped coral reef enclosing a shallow lagoon, with no central island. Atolls form when a volcanic island sinks slowly beneath the sea and the coral reef growing around its perimeter continues to build upward, eventually outliving the island that created it. Darwin figured this out in 1842.
Etymology
Maldivian atholhu, a ring-shaped reef. The word entered English through early European contact with the Maldives.
geology Indigenous ocean water
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