Head out to Goff's Caye, a palm-fringed tropical atoll then island hop to Tobacco Caye where, on the right night, there is magical bioluminescence.
Offshore, Horseshoe Reef is the Caribbean's largest (and the world's third largest) barrier reef, and the coral atoll is home to a vast array of marine life (and a resting place for wrecks).
The people of a vanishing atoll might somehow retain their rights even if they migrated en masse to another country, or merged with another state, bringing their entitlements as a sort of dowry.Yet current law lays down that only islands can support economic areas.
Meanwhile, the Philippines said it had lodged a formal protest against Chinese construction work on an atoll in the disputed Spratly Islands.
But it was only once he had actually set foot on an atoll that he was struck by his epiphany: coral islands had been grown by "insects" (as polyps were then known), not built by God.
One morning, on a small uninhabited atoll called Ducie Island, the remotest of the Pitcairns, he decided to record what he found.
Essentially two islets on an atoll, the territory shrinks at high tide so that "one is about the size of a double bed and the other a small room," as Mr McCormack puts it.
A FEW years ago, a Swiss diplomat complained that his was "the only country larger than a Pacific atoll" not to be a member of the United Nations.
SIPPING beer and staring at the ocean, tourists on Addu atoll at the southern tip of the Maldives usually ponder weighty questions such as whether to strap on a snorkel or sunbathe on the pristine beaches.
It retains important strategic interests on Kwajalein, the country's largest atoll.
A device believed to be 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb exploded over Bikini atoll in March 1954.
