THE RECLAIMERS

Across the world, land that has been used and abandoned by humans is being recolonised by the plants and animals that were there in the first place. Cal Flyn highlights ten hotspots where wildlife is thriving among the ruins.

- Cal Flyn

BIKINI ATOLL

Marshall Islands

The Bikini Atoll is a ring of coral islets encircling a turquoise lagoon that sits in the Pacific Ocean about 2,900km north-east of Papua New Guinea. It was used by the United States as a testing ground for nuclear weapons during the 1940s and 1950s – most notably for the Castle Bravo test in 1954, during which a thermonuclear device was detonated to produce an explosion more than 7,000 times the force of that dropped on Hiroshima.

The blast gouged a crater more than 1.5km across and 80m deep, vaporised two islets and flash-boiled the water in the lagoon, which soared to temperatures of 55,000ºC. It was left a blighted underwater wasteland, devoid of life.

But in 2008, an international team of researchers found a thriving ecosystem had formed up in the crater in the intervening years. While above ground the atoll remains eerily abandoned, its coconuts too contaminated to eat, its waters are now a whirl of kaleidoscopic life, hosting one of the most impressive coral reefs on the planet.

Visiting Bikini in 2017, Stephen Palumbo from Stanford University, California, reported hundreds of schools of fish, from snappers to reef sharks, and described the scene as “visually and emotionally stunning”. Conversely, the fish had been protected from disturbance by the atoll’s traumatic past.

SWONA

Scotland