Cornwallis South Reef ( vi, Đá Núi Le; ), also known as Osmeña Reef ( fil, Bahura ng Osmeña), is a
coral
Corals are marine invertebrates within the class Anthozoa of the phylum Cnidaria. They typically form compact colonies of many identical individual polyps. Coral species include the important reef builders that inhabit tropical oceans and ...
atoll
An atoll () is a ring-shaped island, including a coral rim that encircles a lagoon partially or completely. There may be coral islands or cays on the rim. Atolls are located in warm tropical or subtropical oceans and seas where corals can gr ...
reef
A reef is a ridge or shoal of rock, coral or similar relatively stable material, lying beneath the surface of a natural body of water. Many reefs result from natural, abiotic processes— deposition of sand, wave erosion planing down rock o ...
in the
Spratly Islands
The Spratly Islands ( fil, Kapuluan ng Kalayaan; zh, c=南沙群島/南沙群岛, s=, t=, p=Nánshā Qúndǎo; Malay, id, Kepulauan Spratly; vi, Quần đảo Trường Sa) are a disputed archipelago in the South China Sea. Composed ...
in the
South China Sea
The South China Sea is a marginal sea of the Western Pacific Ocean. It is bounded in the north by the shores of South China (hence the name), in the west by the Indochinese Peninsula, in the east by the islands of Taiwan and northwestern Phi ...
. It covers an area of about 10 km by 5 km, and is entirely submerged at high tide.
[
]
Territorial claims
The atoll is controlled by Vietnam
Vietnam or Viet Nam ( vi, Việt Nam, ), officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,., group="n" is a country in Southeast Asia, at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of and population of 96 million, making i ...
, but is claimed by the Philippines and China as part of its claim to the entire Spratly Islands. In 2009, Vietnam, in a submission to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS), accepted that its continental shelf did not include Cornwallis and therefore they have no entitlement to exploit it.
Development
The atoll has been subjected to a small amount of development by Vietnam. Structures have been built at three points on the atoll, in 2014/15 two access channels were dredged to allow ships enter the lagoon
A lagoon is a shallow body of water separated from a larger body of water by a narrow landform, such as reefs, barrier islands, barrier peninsulas, or isthmuses. Lagoons are commonly divided into ''coastal lagoons'' (or ''barrier lagoons'') ...
, and in 2015 small-scale land reclamation was started beside the new access channels.[ Much of the reclamation work was washed away by ]Typhoon Melor
Typhoon Melor, known in the Philippines as Typhoon Nona, was a powerful tropical cyclone that struck the Philippines in December 2015. The twenty-seventh named storm and the eighteenth typhoon of the annual typhoon season, Melor killed 51 peopl ...
in December 2015.
References
External links
Maritime Transparency Initiative Island Tracker
{{Spratly Islands topics
Atolls of the Spratly Islands
Atolls of Vietnam
Disputed atolls