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Every entry

The whole register

Every entry is one thing that exists only here, and the reason it does. Twenty entries in five sections; the front page carries a selection, this page carries all of it.

Ground and Deep Time — Rifting, ultramafic rock and what it did to life.
No.	Entry	What it is
01.1	Rift and drift	Grande Terre separated from Gondwana roughly eighty million years ago, and almost everything peculiar about the island follows from how long ago that was.
01.2	Ultramafic massifs	Peridotite pushed up over the island's southern third weathers into soil rich in nickel and magnesium and short of everything a plant normally needs.
01.3	Nickel and garnierite	The green ore Jules Garnier identified in the 1860s, the mines at Thio that followed, and the red laterite crust the workings expose.
01.4	Metal in the sap	Hyperaccumulators such as Pycnandra acuminata carry so much nickel that the latex runs blue-green.

Plants — Three quarters of them grow nowhere else.
No.	Entry	What it is
02.1	Amborella	A modest shrub found only here that sits at the base of the entire flowering-plant family tree — the sister lineage to every other flower on earth.
02.2	Cook pines	Araucaria columnaris, the columnar trees James Cook recorded in 1774, and the lean that tracks latitude.
02.3	The maquis minier	The low, hard scrub that grows on metal-rich ground, and why its species are so often confined to one massif.
02.4	Gondwanan relicts	Lineages that survived here after dying out elsewhere, and how the claim is tested.

The Lagoon — A barrier reef and the water it encloses.
No.	Entry	What it is
03.1	The barrier reef	Some 1,500 kilometres of reef enclosing one of the largest lagoons on earth, listed by UNESCO in 2008.
03.2	The double barrier	Two reef lines offshore of the north-west coast, an arrangement with very few parallels anywhere.
03.3	Lagoon floor	Seagrass, sand and patch reef, and why the enclosed water behaves differently from the ocean outside it.
03.4	Mangrove at Voh	The heart-shaped clearing in the mangrove near Voh, formed by salinity and drainage rather than by anyone's hand.

Animals — A flightless bird and a crow that makes tools.
No.	Entry	What it is
04.1	The kagu	Rhynochetos jubatus: grey, flightless, forest-floor, and with no close living relatives — a lineage on its own.
04.2	The tool-making crow	Corvus moneduloides shapes hooked tools from pandanus and is one of very few animals outside primates known to manufacture them.
04.3	Geckos and skinks	Including Rhacodactylus leachianus, among the largest geckos alive, and a lizard fauna that radiated in isolation.
04.4	Notable absences	What never arrived matters as much as what did; the native mammal fauna is bats.

Kanak Land — Whose land it is, and the building on it.
No.	Entry	What it is
05.1	The grande case	A conical timber house built around a central post, with carved door jambs and a roof spear, and the standing it holds in a clan's ground.
05.2	The Tjibaou Centre	Renzo Piano's ten timber cases at Nouméa, shaped and slatted to work the trade wind, opened in 1998.
05.3	Land and clan	Customary land tenure as a living arrangement rather than a historical one.
05.4	The languages	Around thirty Kanak languages, several with very few speakers, and what that means for the record.