Introduction: A Diversity of Oceans, Reefs, People, and Ideas: A Perspective of US Coral Reef Research

By virtue of its geographical extent and the size and wealth of its population, US surveyors and academics entered the scientific coral reef world soon after the study of the latter became of interest. But even earlier, the coral reefs of what are today territories of the USA have been noted and, at least cursorily, studied out of necessity since they were threats to vessels along the trade routes. Also the fossil coral reefs of the USA, of which the country has many famous examples, have received much early study and maybe even more attention than the living coral reefs. They hold a special place in sedimentology and economic geology since some of them are associated with the important oil finds that set off the early twentieth-century oil-boom in places like Texas and Utah. We will not treat these in the present volume, but restrict ourselves to the living coral reefs that can be observed in the ocean today. Recent reviews and entry points to the study of the fossil system can be found, among many others, in Stanley (2001) and Kiessling et al. (2002).