List of islands of Tuvalu

Tuvalu consists of nine separate islands: six atolls and three reef islands.^[1] An atoll typically consists of several motus: Tuvalu has a total of 124 islands and islets. Each island is surrounded by a coral reef. The soils of Tuvalu's islands are usually shallow, porous, alkaline, coarse-textured, with carbonate mineralogy and high pH values of up to 8.2 to 8.9.^[2] The soils are usually deficient in most of the important nutrients needed for plant growth, so garden beds need to be enhanced with mulch to increase their fertility.^[2] Tuvalu's small, widely scattered atolls have a total land area of only about 26 square kilometres (10 square miles) making Tuvalu the fourth-smallest country in the world.

The sea level at the Funafuti tide gauge has been rising at a rate of 3.9 mm per year, and it has been determined that rising sea levels are causing more wave energy to be transferred across reef surfaces, which has tended to push more sand onto island shorelines, increasing islands’ land area.^[3] Over a recent four-decade period, there was a net increase in the land area of the islets of 2.9% (73.5 ha), although the changes were not uniform: About 74% of them increased in size and about 27% decreased in size.