The Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary is a U.S. National Marine Sanctuary in the Florida Keys. It includes the Florida Reef, the only barrier coral reef in North America and the third-largest coral barrier reef in the world. It also has extensive mangrove forest and seagrass fields. The marine sanctuary includes a 2,800 square nautical mile (9,600 km²) area surrounding the Keys and reaching into the Atlantic Ocean, Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. The sanctuary was established in 1990.
Covering much of the ocean floor are beds of seagrass that are of vital importance to the coral reef ecosystem. It is the largest known seagrass bed in the world.
Read more about Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary: Human Impact, Reefs
Famous quotes containing the words florida, keys, national, marine and/or sanctuary:
“In Florida consider the flamingo,
Its color passion but its neck a question.”
—Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989)
“And yet we constantly reclaim some part of that primal spontaneity through the youngest among us, not only through their sorrow and anger but simply through everyday discoveries, life unwrapped. To see a child touch the piano keys for the first time, to watch a small body slice through the surface of the water in a clean dive, is to experience the shock, not of the new, but of the familiar revisited as though it were strange and wonderful.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene, no longer going to Rome for a subject; the poet will sing it; the historian record it; and, with the Landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery, when at least the present form of slavery shall be no more here. We shall then be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown. Then, and not till then, we will take our revenge.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“God has a hard-on for a Marine because we kill everything we see. He plays His game, we play ours.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“He took the props down used for propping open,
And set them up again for propping shut,
The widespread double doors two stories high.
The advantage-disadvantage of these doors
Was that tramp taking sanctuary there
Must leave them unlocked to betray his presence.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)