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         Basically, an island is any piece of land that is surrounded by water. Islands can vary from very small islands such as emergent land features on atolls called islets to huge continental islands or oceanic islands where there is no standard of size which distinguishes islands from islets and continents.
         For this issue we may consider two main types of islands: Continental Islands and Oceanic islands.

Continental islands

         For those bodies of land that lie on the continental shelf of a continent like Greenland, Barbados and Trinidad; Great Britain, Sumatra, New Guinea or Tasmania among many others we call then as Continental islands.
         We also have one special type of continental island called microcontinental island resulting from a continent is rifted for example Madagascar.

Oceanic Islands

         Has opposite to continental islands, those islands that do not sit on continental shelves are called Oceanic Island and they could be of three main types:

• Volcanic (e.g. Mariana Islands),
• Continental fragments (e.g. Iceland),
• Coral reefs (e.g. Maldives).

         Coral reefs are aragonite structures produced by living organisms. In most reefs the predominant organisms are colonial cnidarians that secrete an exoskeleton of calcium carbonate. The accumulation of this skeletal material, broken and piled up by wave action and bioeroders, produces massive calcareous formations that make ideal habitats for living corals and a great variety of other animal and plant life.

         The reefs differ with varying kinds of organic growth, which, in turn, respond to changes in the surrounding ocean. Living reefs lie in waters with mean annual temperatures between 23 and 25 degrees Celsius. Coral reefs are confined, therefore, to the tropical oceans, a benign, gracious, attractive environment.

         There are five basic types of coral reefs:

• Fringing reef – a reef that is directly attached to a shore or borders it with an intervening shallow channel or lagoon.
• Barrier reef – a reef separated from a mainland or island shore by a deep lagoon.
• Patch reef – an isolated, often circular reef, usually within a lagoon or embayment.
• Apron reef – a short reef resembling a fringing reef, but more sloped; extending out and downward from a point or peninsular shore.
• Bank reef – a linear or semi-circular shaped-outline, larger than a patch reef.
• Ribbon reef – a long, narrow, somewhat winding reef, usually associated with an atoll lagoon.
• Atoll reef – a kind of circular or continuous barrier reef extending all the way around a lagoon without a central island.
• Table reef – an isolated reef, approaching an atoll type, but without a lagoon.

         Catalina Island is a small island with only 9.6 square kilometers of area and is formed by three overlapping plateaus with its highest elevation being only 20 meters above sea level. This table reef island is entirely "built" out of coral stone it has a carstlike structure with very little vegetation. A massive line of sand dunes and mangrove swamps serve as a natural protection line to the island habitats. There is practically no sweet water to be found on Catalina with the exception of a very weak torrent of water inside a massive karst formation; it has a salty taste and serves as a fountain for the few wild animals found there. Actually "wild” is not correct as those are domestic animals like pigs and rabbits abandoned and left on their own over the years.

How can you log the cache?

To claim this cache as found you should send to this cache owner a message answering correctly the following questions:

• At the given coordinates you will be at the top of some kind of “soil”. Identify it?
• Thoroughly identify the type of Catalina Island.
• Post one picture of inside the water (without revealing the ground), another one of you in shore holding your GPSr and another one of the island from distance.

If you believe you have successfully completed this Earth Cache goals and has already sent to this cache owner all the requirements as requested, Please, feel free to log it as found. Later we will verify the requirements sent and, if necessary, contact you in order to make the necessary corrections to your log.