Beistle Coconut Bikini Top

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Planted in the ’60s as part of the atoll’s recovery, they stand in mechanically precise rows with the exactness of soldiers in formation, totally unlike the randomness of trees on a normal Pacific atoll. It’s a promise that remains unfulfilled today. Normal life on the atoll is impossible, because the groundwater is contaminated. No one lives there apart from a half-dozen custodians who tend a small ghost village. All food and water must be imported. On other islands, the crabs are a highly sought delicacy, with full-sized adults rarely seen in the daytime. On Bikini, giant coconut crabs amble about with impunity.

Having previously done research on American Samoa and other Pacific islands and atolls, Palumbi was at once on familiar terrain in Bikini and aware of its pervasive oddity. The atoll is still littered with parts from exploded planes and ships. At one point, the expedition crew found a 100-foot-long steel chain, suitable for mooring huge ships, lying on a beach, as if it had washed up — and yet no wave on Earth could have moved it. Even the palm trees on Bikini’s main islands were off. 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. It took a moment to realize the alarm wasn’t malfunctioning. 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. EVOLVING ECOSYSTEM: Palumbi (above) and his research team will compare the genomes of coconut crabs and corals from Bikini Atoll with those from American Samoa to see what decades of radioactivity have wrought. (Photos: Dan Griffin)But the idea of explosions capable of putting radiocarbon into every person, plant and animal on Earth made vivid to him a whole new level of destruction. When the producers of Big Pacific invited him to choose an expedition for use in the documentary, he knew exactly where he wanted to go.

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. “You’re kind of looking at that and thinking, ‘Well, that’s strange.’ It’s equivalent to 216 Empire State Buildings being blown into the sky. These tests are the most violent thing we’ve ever done to the ocean.’ The terrible history of Bikini Atoll is an ironic setting for research that might help people live longer,” Palumbi says. “By understanding how corals could have recolonized the radiation-filled bomb craters, maybe we can discover something new about keeping DNA intact.” A DISTANT PLACEDan Griffin, a photographer on the trip, said the serenity of the place could be lulling. Fish, birds and other animals, unaccustomed to human presence, were fearless and hardly reacted to the visitors, he says. To remind themselves of the more ominous side of paradise, they had a phrase they’d bandy about: “The coconuts are radioactive.” The figurative sense of "shattering or devastating thing or event" is attested by 1859. In reference to a pretty woman "of startling vitality or physique" [OED], especially a blonde, it is attested by 1942. "Bombshell" as title of a movie starring blond U.S. actress Jean Harlow (1911-1937) is from 1933; it was believed to have been loosely based on the life of screen star Clara Bow. Every human on Earth had twice as much radioactive C-14 after those tests as before,” Palumbi says.