Something wild is happening on Christmas Island, once ground zero for nuclear test explosions ...
Between 1957 and 1962, this former British colony in the equatorial Pacific played involuntary host to 30 nuclear explosions conducted by the British and U.S. militaries....
What can be found in abundance, however, is nature. In the intervening decades since the era of nuclear-weapons testing, the natural world has quietly rebounded. Today, Christmas Island, Bikini Atoll and other Cold War proving grounds, like Monte Bello north of Perth, Australia, constitute some of the most ecologically intact corners of the world, emitting not radiation but a peculiar allure; it's atomic tourism with a naturalist spin.
Marine biologists diving at Bikini have returned with glowing reports. Inspecting a mile-wide crater left by a hydrogen bomb that exploded with a force 1,000 times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, researchers recently found the lagoon to be 80 percent covered by thriving corals, with some species growing into huge, treelike formations.
Karen Koltes, a coral specialist with the U.S. Department of the Interior, says reefs around places like Bikini "are among the few examples left in the world of what an ecosystem looks like absent human presence and exploitation." (Unintentionally pouring on the irony, scientists will sometimes employ the word "pristine.")
http://www.salon.com/env/feature/2008/0 ... as_island/
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