What is the Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System?
The Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System site in Belize was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1996. The site is an outstanding natural system, consisting of the largest barrier reef in the northern hemisphere, offshore atolls, and several hundred sand cays, mangrove forests, coastal lagoons, and estuaries.
Where is the Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System?
The Belize Barrier Reef is a series of coral reefs straddling the coast of Belize, roughly 300 meters (980 ft) offshore in the north and 40 kilometers (25 mi) in the south within the country limits.
What is the reef called in Belize?
Belize Barrier Reef
Belize Barrier Reef, coral reef that is second in size after the Great Barrier Reef of Australia and is the largest of its kind in the Northern and Western hemispheres.
What type of reef is the Belize Barrier Reef?
coral reefs
The Belize Barrier Reef is one of four types of coral reefs: fringing, barrier, atolls and patch. Barrier reefs, like fringing reefs, run parallel to the coastline but are separated from land by a deeper, wider body of water.
What is special about the Belize Barrier Reef?
The Belize Barrier Reef is the second-largest coral reef system in the world and one of the most sought-after tourist destinations for recreational activities such as diving, snorkeling, sailing, and fishing. In 1996, it was designated as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
How the Belize Barrier Reef was formed?
The reef wall is formed by numerous colonies of living, breathing invertebrates, coral polyps. The various species of coral that form the reef are carnivorous tube-shaped polyps that live within a hard, protective skeleton formed by excreting calcium carbonate.
How was Belize Barrier Reef formed?
Why is Belize Barrier Reef important?
It is the basis of the national fishing industry and in large measure tourism, which is the greatest contributor to GDP and economic livelihood. 1.4 The Belize Barrier Reef is not only of great importance to the nation and people of Belize, but also the wider global citizenry.
How the barrier reef was formed?
The Great Barrier Reef, just like every reef, was formed from the presence of one humble organism. The coral polyp is ousted from its parents into the deep sea and eventually rests on a stationary object like a rock. It then attaches itself to the object and the reef, as we know it, begins to take shape.
Why is the Belize Barrier Reef important to Belize?
Where does the Barrier Reef start?
Cape York Peninsula
The Great Barrier Reef is in the Coral Sea, on Australia’s north-eastern coast. It stretches more than 2,300km along the state of Queensland’s coastline, beginning at the tip of Cape York Peninsula in the north and extending down to Bundaberg in the south.
How and when was the Great Barrier Reef formed?
It has moved and morphed over the years and was first encountered by humans 40,000 years ago when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples settled in the area. The current reef is about 6,000 to 8,000 years old and was formed after the last ice age began to recede and water levels and temperatures rapidly changed.