LAST year I took a boat across a stunning emerald lagoon which formed the centre of a tiny uninhabited atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

Some of the islands are large, with mountain interiors and fast-flowing rivers, while others are tiny atolls in stunning lagoons.

This tiny atoll, with an area of just 30 ha and rising no more than 3 m above mean sea level, is situated at 16.45 South and 179.6 West.

Two men from the Pacific island of Kiribati who were adrift in the Pacific have turned up on a tiny atoll 300 miles away, after 33 days at sea.

He attended "an offshore yeshiva . . . on this tiny atoll in the Maldive Islands a few hundred miles southwest of India."

Then came another, larger and white, and another and another until the tiny atoll 60 yards from shore was draped in warming sea mammals.

With more than 2,000 islands, ranging from tiny atolls to the veritable continent that is Crete, maritime Greece is unmatched...

In November 1943, the United States Marine Corps' capture of the tiny atoll of Tarawa in the central Pacific had cost more than 3,000 casualties.

Airstrips, gun emplacements and a seaplane base quickly materialized on the tiny atoll.

As his 12-seater plane makes an unscheduled stop at a tiny atoll in the Marshall Islands, he spots that there are no tin roofs and lets the plane go on without him.