Beistle Coconut Bikini Top

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Given their short life spans and their mobility, the hearty fish were comparatively easy to understand. But the corals look like they have been growing in place for 50-some years. 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. It’s an area of research López says has received scant attention. 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. 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. also bomb-shell, 1708, "mortar-thrown shell which explodes upon falling," from bomb (n.) + shell (n.).

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. 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.

EVENTS & ENTERTAINING

Coconut girl" aesthetic, as it's been coined by platform creators, bridges the gap between Depop and Moana. Per user @fa1ryprince3, it's most often expressed in the form of hibiscus and floral prints, three-piece bikinis (with a micro-sarong), crochet bags, and bias-cut midi skirts. Bombe). A hollow iron ball or shell filled with gunpowder, having a vent or fuze-hole into which a fuzee is fitted to set the powder on fire after the shell is thrown out of a mortar. This destructive missile is intended to do injury both by its force in falling, and by bursting after it falls. [Arthur Young, "Nautical Dictionary," London, 1863] At one point, Palumbi was boating around Bravo Crater, a mile-wide scar blasted into the lagoon by the most potent U.S. bomb ever detonated, when the navigation system began screaming a warning. The device thought they had run aground. The boat, Palumbi says, was in 160 feet of water. 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. The terrible history of Bikini Atoll is an ironic setting for research that might help people live longer. By understanding how corals could have recolonized the radiation-filled bomb craters, maybe we can discover something new about keeping DNA intact.’

Yet despite their radioactive diet, the crabs suffer no obvious ill effects. Palumbi and López are sequencing their genomes for comparison against samples from American Samoa and from Bikini before the nuclear testing began. “The question is, what is it doing to them?” Palumbi says. “We don’t have any idea. The way to get into the heart of it is to look at the DNA.”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) 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. 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.

Every human on Earth had twice as much radioactive C-14 after those tests as before,” Palumbi says. Dan 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 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. It’s tempting to draw reassuring lessons from the atoll’s recovery. The research, López says, provides at least preliminary evidence that even if you destroy an ecosystem, it can heal with time — and with freedom from human interference. Ironically, Bikini reefs look better than those in many places she’s dived. 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. “There’s a grid of them in every direction, so you know you’re in a very, very strange landscape,” Palumbi says.

It didn’t look like this nightmare-scape that you might expect,” she says. “And that’s still something that’s weird to process.”

Initially, they plan to sequence the full genomes of their samples, López says. 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. One of the guys working on the boat we were living on was of Bikinian descent,” López says. “Talking to him put in perspective what his family went through and how weird it is now to make a living off bringing scientists and tourists to the islands when his own family can’t live there.” And despite Bikini’s remove, the rest of the world wasn’t beyond the reach of the blasts, which is how Palumbi grew interested in the atoll. The explosions — along with similar tests by other nations — caused a spike in atmospheric levels of carbon 14, a radioactive isotope that’s naturally created by cosmic rays interacting with nitrogen. Like other forms of carbon, C-14 is readily absorbed by plants and, in turn, animals. 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.