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The magnitude 8.3Mw earthquake struck 175 kilometres south of the Samoan Islands on 29 September 2009 at 6:48am local time.   A few minutes later, a series of earthquake triggered tsunami waves hit American Samoa, Western Samoa and the small northern island of Niuatoputapu in Tonga.  The tsunami waves, some of which are said to have been as high as 6m, caused fatalities, casualties and devastated entire communities in the Pacific Island countries.

The Government of Kiribati, represented by Hon. Nabuti Mwenikarawa, Minister of Finance & Economic Planning and Ms Teea Tira, Secretary of Finance & Economic Planning and National Authorising Officer, and the European Commission, represented by Mr Roberto Ridolfi, Head of the Commission Delegation for the Pacific, hereinafter referred to as the Parties, held discussions from March 2006 until August 2007 with a view to determining the general orientations for cooperation for the period 2008-2013.

Tongatapu, like Tahiti, was visited by many early European navigators and was one of the first of the South Pacific islands to be charted in any detail. Though it was discovered (and named Amsterdam Island) by Tasman in January 1643 (Sharp 1968, 152-158), the first comments on the sand cays of the surrounding reefs were made by Cook during his second voyage, with the Resolution and Adventure, in October 1773. On this occasion Cook spent less than a week at Tongatapu, anchored in the northwest, and commented that "it would have taken up more time than I could spare to have surveyed these parts Minutely as there are a number of small Islots and reefs of rocks extending to the NE even further than we could see" (1961, 261). His naturalists, the Forsters, did not describe the cays, though Georg Forster remarked on the emersion of reef limestones on Tongatapu and its similarity to the continuing emergence of the land in Scandinavia (1777, I, 453). Cook returned on his last voyage in 1777, with the Resolution and Discovery, and stayed for a month. He anchored near modern Nuku'alofa and landed on Pangaimotu and possibly other islands (1967, 124-125, 155, 890). He charted the area but gave no description of the cays.

Country profiles on the state of coral reefs systems in the Pacific

Mongabay rainforest profiles: American Samoa, French Polynesia, Guam, Kiribati, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu