BUKA ISLAND: WHY CAVE EXPLORERS LOVE IT B uka Island is elongated – 56km long and
“Buka’s caves have been the refuge of the early seafarers who navigated from Southeast Asia 29,000 years ago”
Southeast Asia 29,000 years ago. During the coldest part of the last Ice Age, from 28,000 to 18,000 years ago, Buka Island was part of a much larger 46,400sq.km land mass known as ‘Greater Bougainville’. It connected the present-day islands of Buka, Bougainville, Shortland Islands, Choiseul, Santa Isabel and Nggela (all in the Solomons) into a bigger continuous island separated from Guadalcanal by a narrow passage.
15km wide – with a land surface of 492sq.km, and
runs. from Hanpan Cape in the north to Buka Passage in the south, with the Parkinson Range running along the west coast. A Pleistocene reef complex, the Sohano limestone covers most of Buka, which is rather flat on its eastern and northern half. Somehow, following the beach and the coastline north of Buka Airport, one realises from the conspicuous cliffs that the whole island is actually an uplifted coral reef structure – a lower Miocene platform tilted 1° to the south and west. Made of coral, algae, echinoids, mollusks and foraminifera, the cliffs rise from five to 25m and more in height, carved by wave action and riddled with caves and overhangs. And these have been the refuge of the early seafarers who navigated from
View of Buka Island’s northeast coast from the top of a cliff
VOLUME 39 2024
17
Made with FlippingBook Learn more on our blog