A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
lagoon
A lagoon is a shallow body of water separated from the open sea by a barrier — a reef, a spit, a chain of islands, or the rim of a sunken volcano. Coastal lagoons sit behind barrier beaches and are brackish and shifting. Atoll lagoons sit inside a ring of coral and are the drowned crater of a volcano that sank while the reef kept growing upward on its rim.
Etymology
The word came into English from Italian and French, from the Latin for a pool or a pond, and it arrived attached to one place in particular: the lagoon of Venice, which is what English speakers first used the word for. The same Latin root also gives English lake.
Notes
Darwin worked out how atolls form on the voyage of the Beagle before he had seen one properly, reasoning that a fringing reef around a sinking island would grow upward and end as a ring enclosing a lagoon with nothing in the middle. Drilling into Pacific atolls in the twentieth century found volcanic rock far below the coral, exactly where he had put it.