In our last Reefscape story, we explored the northern Marshall Islands in search of answers about the long-term effects of nuclear fallout on coral reefs. We visited Rongelap and Ailinginae atolls, where Cesium-137 and other highly radioactive material from 1954’s Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll had drifted downwind, falling like snow on the people, lands, and reefs. Baker nuclear bomb test at Bikini in 1946. Courtesy of the DOE. Sixty-four years later, in 2018, our coral reef findings at Rongelap and Ailinginae were double-edged: on the one hand, we discovered pristine shallow and deep-water reefs teeming with corals, fish, invertebrates and predators. There was seemingly no sign that these reefs had once been exposed to a nuclear winter. On the other hand, we found recent coral bleaching caused by an ocean heat wave in 2014 that generated vast stretches of undersea desert with relatively little life. Our findings were a shock, challenging our understanding of how much a reef can take before it disappears, and confronting us with the possibility that climate change may be worse for coral reefs than nuclear fallout. Google Earth image showing Bikini atoll The voyage to Rongelap and Ailinginae also drew new questions about the repeated atom bomb tests, which occurred 100 kilometers (60 miles) west of Rongelap on the famous Bikini Atoll. It was the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb that famously caused a massive downwind radiation plume that engulfed Rongelap. But eight years before it, in 1946, there were another two…
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