D'Entrecasteaux Islands () are situated near the eastern tip of
New Guinea in the
Solomon Sea in
Milne Bay Province of
Papua New Guinea. The group spans a distance of , has a total land area of approximately and is separated from the Papua New Guinea mainland by the wide
Ward Hunt Strait in the north and the wide
Goschen Strait in the south. D'Entrecasteaux Islands show signs of
volcanism.
People
The inhabitants of D'Entrecasteaux Islands are indigenous
subsistence horticulturalists living in small, traditional settlements. People of this area produced and traded clay pots as well as participated in the
Kula
Kula, which translates as ''Tower'' from Serbo-Croatian, may refer to:
People
*Bob Kula, American football player
*Irwin Kula (born 1957), American rabbi and author
*Karel Kula (born 1963), Czech footballer
Places
* Kula, Bihać, a village in ...
exchange of shell valuables, travelling widely to other islands on sea-going sailing canoes. During the more recent past, people harvested
copra,
trochus and
pearl-shells and some timber for cash.
Alluvial gold mining was once important and in recent years the area has been subject to
mineral exploration.
Description

The three principal islands, from northwest to southeast, are
Goodenough (Nidula), then across Moresby Strait to
Fergusson
Fergusson may refer to:
Places
*County of Fergusson, South Australia, Australia
*Fergusson Island, off the coast of New Guinea
*Fergusson Glacier, Wilson Hills, Antarctica
*Nacimiento-Fergusson Road, the only road across the Santa Lucia Range in t ...
(Moratau
), the largest of the three, and across Dawson Strait to
Normanby Island (Duau
).
In addition there are numerous small islands and reefs.
Sanaroa and
Dobu are the most significant of the smaller islands, while Sori or Wild is named for
HMS ''Challengers artist,
John James Wild. The highest peak in the group is the
Mount Vineuo on Goodenough Island.
The D'Entrecasteaux Islands are volcanically active, with a number of areas of historic/geologic volcanism and active
geothermal fields. Fergusson Island has three volcanic masses over high. There are geothermal areas in the south east area of Goodenough Island
and the Bwabwadana and Iamalele
on Fergusson Island. A particularly active hot springs is located at Deidei on Fergusson.
Between Fergusson and Normanby Islands the Dawson Straits Group has several volcanic centres that may define a partly submerged
caldera
A caldera ( ) is a large cauldron-like hollow that forms shortly after the emptying of a magma chamber in a volcano eruption. When large volumes of magma are erupted over a short time, structural support for the rock above the magma chamber is ...
; one of the cones on southwestern Fergusson Island may have erupted in 1350.
Geologically the islands are largely made up of rock that probably once belonged to the northern edge of the Australian
plate that was thrust deep into the Earth's crust by plate collision.
The burial of these rocks to great depths (where they also encountered correspondingly high temperatures) metamorphosed the rocks to
eclogite facies
Eclogite () is a metamorphic rock containing garnet (almandine-pyrope) hosted in a matrix of sodium-rich pyroxene (omphacite). Accessory minerals include kyanite, rutile, quartz, lawsonite, coesite, amphibole, phengite, paragonite, zoisite, dolom ...
: >2GPa and >700˚C. Specifically, these islands play host to the youngest known coesite-eclogite sample; CA-
TIMS dating of zircons within this sample dates its formation to ~5Ma, meaning it has been exhumed from a depth of ~100 km
at the remarkable rate of ~20mm/yr.
The rock at the centre of the tall domes in these islands was thus recently very deep in the Earth. Over a very short time, geologically speaking, these packets of rocks have ascended through the Earth's shallow mantle and pushed through the crust to form the gneiss domes we find today – the vestiges of the crust these massifs have thrust through are still draped as carapaces over the edges of the domes.
These islands are thought to be geophysically significant because they lie immediately ahead of the west-most rift tip of the Woodlark spreading centre, which has been propagating westwards into the continent. The D'Entrecasteaux thus represent a stage of continental breakup just preceding fully-fledged volcanic spreading.
History
The group was named for the French navigator
Antoine Raymond Joseph de Bruni d'Entrecasteaux, who, in his ship the ''
Espérance'', passed through the area in 1792 while searching for his missing compatriot,
Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse. Almost a century later, in 1874, Captain
John Moresby of made a
running survey of the west coast of the islands and became the first European to make landfall.
[
D. Jenness M.A. (Oxon) and Rev. A. Ballantyne. (1920) ''The Northern D'Entrecasteaux'', Oxford University Press.]
In 1891, the Methodist Church of Australia established a mission station on
Dobu Island. There, natives were recruited to work in gold mines and on copra plantations. Another mission was established in 1898 at Bwaidoga, Mud Bay, on the south coast of Goodenough Island.
[
The island group became a focus of activity in World War II when Imperial Japanese troops were marooned on Goodenough Island briefly in 1942, before being attacked by the ]Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...
n 2/12th Battalion. In 1943 RAAF mobile works squadrons constructed an airfield with a airstrip and other facilities at Vivigani Airfield on the site of a smaller, pre-war airstrip that existed at that location.
It was used by allied forces from June 1943 to August 1944 as a staging point for operations in New Guinea and nearby occupied islands. Vivigani airstrip has been open to commercial service since 1963. A US Navy PT-Boat base was established on Fergusson Island in June 1942.
References
External links
{{DEFAULTSORT:D'Entrecasteaux Islands
Archipelagoes of Papua New Guinea
Islands of Milne Bay Province
Volcanoes of Papua New Guinea