For most outsiders, it takes several island hops, including a 27-hour boat ride. The atoll is in the Marshall Islands, halfway between Hawaii and Australia. “By understanding how corals could have recolonized the radiation-filled bomb craters, maybe we can discover something new about keeping DNA intact.” A DISTANT PLACE “The terrible history of Bikini Atoll is an ironic setting for research that might help people live longer,” Palumbi says. The research, Palumbi says, could eventually have ramifications not just for understanding how corals tightly manage their genes, but for advancing therapeutic applications to prevent cancers and other mutations in humans. Then, using bioinformatics methods originally developed to study cancerous tumors, they plan to create a map of mutations in the coral colonies to compare with samples taken from American Samoa and, they hope, from pre-bomb Bikini. Initially, they plan to sequence the full genomes of their samples, López says. These tests are the most violent thing we’ve ever done to the ocean.’ ‘It’s equivalent to 216 Empire State Buildings being blown into the sky. It’s an area of research López says has received scant attention. How they emerged from such toxic beginnings is a question Palumbi and doctoral student Elora López hope to illuminate using the genomes of samples they took from Bikini. But the corals look like they have been growing in place for 50-some years. Given their short life spans and their mobility, the hearty fish were comparatively easy to understand. “Frankly, the visual and emotional impact of it is just stunning.” “You’re kind of looking at that and thinking, ‘Well, that’s strange.’ “We found, much to our surprise, not just scattered corals, but very abundant, big healthy coral communities - corals larger than cars scattered about the edges of a hydrogen bomb crater,” he says. Yet when Palumbi - the director of Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station - and others dove near the crater’s rim, they encountered something even more astonishing to behold: a reassembling ecosystem, including schools of large fish, reef sharks and robust coral, which may have begun life as little as a decade after the area’s annihilation. “These tests are the most violent thing we’ve ever done to the ocean.” “It’s equivalent to 216 Empire State Buildings being blown into the sky,” Palumbi says. Using the navigation device, they then boated around the perimeter of the missing coral to estimate how much mass had been hurled heavenward. The navigation system was simply relying on maps that haven’t been redrawn since before 1954, when a bomb 1,000 times more powerful than the one that dropped on Hiroshima vaporized three islands in the lagoon, including the one where the expedition crew was. It took a moment to realize the alarm wasn’t malfunctioning. The boat, Palumbi says, was in 160 feet of water. bomb ever detonated, when the navigation system began screaming a warning. But it doesn’t take long to pick up on Bikini’s enduring eeriness, says Stanford biology professor Stephen Palumbi, who visited the remote atoll for a 10-day research trip featured in Big Pacific, a documentary that aired this summer on PBS.Īt one point, Palumbi was boating around Bravo Crater, a mile-wide scar blasted into the lagoon by the most potent U.S. Nearly 60 years after the last of 23 nuclear explosions in its land, air and water, Bikini Atoll again looks like the idyllic Pacific paradise it was in 1946 - a bracelet of sandy, palm-covered islets encircling an azure lagoon.
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