Oceania Pacific Geography

Australia is the world's largest island, dominated by a vast, arid interior (the Outback) ringed by more fertile coastlines — tropical rainforest and reef in the northeast, temperate coast in the southeast and southwest. The Great Barrier Reef, running over 2,300 kilometers off Australia's northeast coast, is the largest coral reef system on Earth, visible even from space.

New Zealand sits on the boundary of two tectonic plates, producing a landscape of active volcanoes, geothermal fields, and the Southern Alps — a mountain range extending nearly the length of the South Island, including glaciers that reach almost to sea level, unusually low-latitude for glacial ice.

Fiji is a volcanic archipelago of more than 300 islands, roughly a third of them inhabited, surrounded by extensive coral reef systems. French Polynesia spans five island groups across a vast stretch of the South Pacific, including the classic volcanic-island-and-lagoon geography of Bora Bora and Tahiti. The Solomon Islands are a chain of volcanic islands and coral atolls between Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu, covered largely in dense rainforest.