Fly River, one of the largest rivers of the island of New Guinea, flowing almost wholly through Papua New Guinea. For a short stretch of its middle course, it forms the border between Papua New Guinea on the east and the Indonesian half of the island on the west. Rising on the Star, Kaban, and Hindenburg ranges of the Victor Emanuel Range in the central highlands, the Fly—fed by its principal tributaries, the Strickland, Alice (Tedi), and Palmer rivers—flows south and southeast for more than 700 miles (1,100 km) to the Gulf of Papua, Coral Sea, and drains an area of some 27,000 square miles (69,900 square km). The river was named by F.P. Blackwood, captain of the ship HMS Fly, who explored the estuary in 1842. Traversing deep gorges through rainforests in its upper course, the river broadens and deepens its channel below the Palmer Junction. From this junction to the sea, a distance of some 530 miles (850 km), the river is navigable in all seasons for boats drawing less than 8 feet (2.4 metres) of water. This lowest stretch, in which the stream falls only about 50 feet (15 metres), is bordered by open savanna-like country and swampy plains with numerous lakes. The Fly may be in flood from October to April, moving millions of tons of sediment downstream to be deposited as shifting sandbars and islands (Kiwai, Wabuda, Purutu) in its 40-mile- (64-km-) wide mouth. The material, together with that transported by the Digul and other neighbouring streams, has built up an enormous plain bordering the Torres Strait. There are few settlements of any size along the river, but a port at the town of Kiunga, some 490 miles (790 km) inland, ships copper and gold mined in the Star Mountains. Environmental degradation along the upper course of the river system caused by the mining activity has been a source of political tension in the area. There are only a few coconut plantations in the area; crocodiles are hunted. The total indigenous population is scanty.
This article was most recently revised and updated by J.E. Luebering.
The islands that constitute Papua New Guinea were settled over a period of 40,000 years by the mixture of peoples who are generally referred to as Melanesians. Since the country achieved independence in 1975, one of its principal challenges has been the difficulty of governing many hundreds of diverse, once-isolated local societies as a viable single nation.
Papua New Guinea stretches from just south of the Equator to the Torres Strait, which separates New Guinea from Cape York Peninsula to the south, the northernmost extension of Australia. Mainland Papua New Guinea reaches its maximum north-south expanse of some 510 miles (820 km) along its western border with Indonesian Papua. Almost completely straight, the boundary is formed primarily by the line of longitude 141° E and curves only briefly westward to follow the Fly River for approximately 50 miles (80 km), starting just southwest of Kiunga.
From the western border the land tapers—with a substantial indentation in the south coast formed by the Gulf of Papua—to a fingerlike shape that points southeast toward the D’Entrecasteaux Islands and the Louisiade Archipelago. Off the mainland are a number of small islands and island groups scattered to the north and east and, farther northeast, Bougainville Island and the Bismarck Archipelago; the latter forms a crescent that arcs from the Admiralty Islands in the north to New Britain and Umboi Island, off the mainland’s Huon Peninsula.
Papua New Guinea’s magnificent and varied scenery reflects a generally recent geologic history in which movements of the Earth’s crust resulted in the collision of the northward-moving Australian Plate with the westward-moving Pacific Plate. The low-lying plains of southern New Guinea are geologically part of the Australian Plate. Indeed, New Guinea was separated physically from Australia only some 8,000 years ago by the shallow flooding of the Torres Strait. The southern New Guinea plains, called the Fly-Digul shelf (named for the Fly and Digul rivers), are geologically stable.
Northward lies a belt of limestone country of varying width, most prominent in the Kikori River–Lake Kutubu area. This forms an extraordinarily harsh environment of jumbled karst, dolines, rock towers, and seemingly endless ridges of jagged rock, all covered in virtually impenetrable lowland rainforest.
A mountainous zone called the Highlands, extending from the west to the southeast, occupies the central part of the island of New Guinea. In Papua New Guinea those mountains reach elevations in excess of 13,000 feet (4,000 metres), rising to the country’s highest point of 14,793 feet (4,509 metres) at Mount Wilhelm in the Bismarck Range, part of the Central Range. The Highlands also feature enclosed upland basins whose floors are usually at 4,500 feet (1,370 metres) or higher. The basins contain lake deposits, formed in the recent geologic past by impeded drainage; soil wash from the surrounding mountains; and layers of volcanic ash, or tephra, deposited from nearby volcanoes, some of them recently active. Such basins, therefore, are usually very fertile.
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The north coast of the mainland, unlike the swampy south coast, drops sharply to the sea. The country’s most northerly zone consists of a complex unstable volcanic arc in the Bismarck Sea stretching southeastward from the Schouten Islands (not to be confused with the Indonesian island group of the same name) to the Huon Peninsula and eastward through the island of New Britain. There the arc bifurcates, one arm sweeping northwestward through New Ireland and the Admiralty Islands, the other proceeding southeastward through Buka, Bougainville, and the country of Solomon Islands.
Drainage and soils
Steeply sloping mountain areas, exceptionally heavy rainfall, geologic instability in all except the most southerly areas, and the rapid growth of both population and commercial enterprise have combined to create some of the highest soil-erosion rates in the world, rivaling those of the Himalaya region. Consequently, while rivers are usually quite short in length, they carry extraordinarily high sediment loads, which have built up vast swampy plains and deltas, especially along the Sepik, Ramu, Fly, and Purari river systems. Once they leave the Highlands, often through spectacular gorges, such rivers meander slowly across the sediment plains. For example, some 510 miles (820 km) from its mouth, the elevation of the Fly River is a mere 60 feet (18 metres) above sea level, an average downhill gradient of only about 1.5 inches per mile (2.4 cm per km). The high deposition rates create major problems for any proposed human use of those rivers, such as transportation or hydroelectricity generation. The northern volcanic fringe contains some of the most fertile soils of the islands.
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