The Geology of the Aru Islands

The Aru Archipelago consists of a group of some eighty low islands which rise from the shallow sea between western New Guinea and Australia. They have been interpreted by Wichmann (1887, pp. 120–1) as the south-eastern members of an arc, to which he assigned also the Sula, Obi, and Misool Islands, and part of the south-western coast of New Guinea. This arc he regarded as the easternmost of three arcs at the eastern end of the Banda Sea. This view has been adopted, amongst others, by Koto (1899, p. 97, pl. i). The Aru Islands consist, according to the account in Verbeek's “Molukken Verslag” (1908, pp. 9, 464–5, fig. 420), of an almost horizontal limestone plateau, which has been broken by uplift into more than eighty pieces.