Geography of New Caledonia Geography of New Caledonia The geography of New Caledonia ("Nouvelle-Calédonie"), an overseas collectivity of France located in the subregion of Melanesia, makes the continental island group unique in the southwest Pacific. Among other things, the island chain has played a role in preserving unique biological lineages from the Mesozoic. It served as a waystation in the expansion of the predecessors of the Polynesians, the Lapita culture. Under the Free French it was a vital naval base for Allied Forces during the War in the Pacific. The archipelago is located east of Australia, north of New Zealand, south of the Equator,
Geography of New Caledonia the vast majority, some 93%, submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean. This viewpoint is not universal. Bernard Pelletier argues that Grande Terre was completely submerged for millions of years, and hence the origin of the flora may not be local in nature, but due to long distance-dispersal. Zealandia is in area, larger than Greenland or India, and almost half the size of Australia. It is unusually slender, stretching from New Caledonia in the north to beyond New Zealand's subantarctic islands in the south (from latitude 19° south to 56° south, analogous to ranging from Haiti to Hudson Bay or from Sudan