Finance
As Stephen Palumbi looked around the deep blue water, he had the eerie impression that something wasn’t right. It was the summer of 2016 and Palumbi – a professor of marine sciences at Stanford University – was on an expedition, scuba diving to assess the state of an obscure patch of reef in the Central Pacific.
What he and his fellow researchers found was a forgotten world of astonishing abundance – grazing herds of plump parrot fish, eight-metre- high (26ft) forests of branching corals, humphead wrasse the size of baby rhinos… and sharks. So many sharks. “You couldn’t look in any direction without seeing one or two,” he says.
But there was also an atmosphere of the abnormal – a scattering of uncanny clues that this place was different. “Every time you turned around, there was something strange going on,” says Palumbi. Like a mysterious crack in the reef. Small, irregular fissures are not uncommon, except this one was in a perfectly straight line – an orderly chasm at least a mile long.
And then there was the navigation incident. Earlier, his team had been aboard the dive boat, about to drop anchor in a lagoon several kilometers from the nearest land, when the navigation system started “screaming” – according to its calculations, they had run aground. They hadn’t.
Palumbi was diving in one of the most radioactive places on Earth: the Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Archipelago. Nearly seven decades earlier, this ring-shaped band of islands – formerly an archetypal tropical paradise – had been used to test the atomic bomb. Over 12 years in the 1940s and 50s, the US blasted its tranquil waters and those of a neighboring atoll with 67 nuclear weapons equivalent to 210 megatons of TNT – more than 7,000 times the force used at Hiroshima. Palumbi’s navigation system was off because certain islands, still recorded on older maps, had been entirely vaporised by the explosions.
This dark past has left a devastating legacy for the Bikini islanders, who have been unable to return to their home ever since. But it has also created an accidental sanctuary: a place where wildlife is protected by the area’s very toxicity. For almost 70 years, there has been no fishing.
