The Road To Recovery

The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and Bikini Atoll are still devoid of humans. But without the threat of our presence, could wildlife thrive in a radioactive environment?

- Alla Katsnelson

Early this year, the Doomsday Clock ticked forwards to two minutes to apocalypse – the closest it’s been since 1953 when the US and the Soviet Union tested hydrogen bombs. The Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists opted to move the clock forwards due to growing concerns about potential nuclear war, whether such events be borne of strife between the US and North Korea, Pakistan and India, or some other crisis point.

In the past, we have seen the immediate effects of radiation, through nuclear bombs or power station failures. By visiting radioactive sites like these, enterprising scientists can find out about the long-term impact of radiation on the environment, so we know what to expect in the event that someone pushes the big red button.

GOING NUCLEAR

One place that might offer some clues is Bikini Atoll, a ring-shaped coral reef located in the Marshall Islands. In 1946, the US evacuated Bikini’s residents, then spent 12 years testing its nuclear firepower by detonating 23 nuclear bombs there, including one that packed 1,000 times the power of the one that devastated Hiroshima and was the largest nuclear device that the US ever exploded. It’s a place, you might think, that’d be completely devoid of life to this day.

But in 2016, Steve Palumbi, professor of marine sciences at Stanford University in California, visited Bikini to document the marine life. He first got interested in Bikini while researching his book The Extreme Life Of The Sea. He learned that the age of organisms could be determined by measuring their artificial carbon-14 levels caused by hydrogen bomb tests in the middle of the last century. So when he was invited by the US television station PBS to do a documentary series called The Big Pacific, he told the producers that he wanted to go to Bikini Atoll.