Kiritimati

Ambassador Teburoro Tito of the tiny Pacific island nation of Kiribati said the United States and Britain carried out 33 nuclear tests on Kiritimati, its atoll also known as Christmas Island, in the 1950s and 1960s.

From 1997 to 2016, Cobb dived at one of the tiny islands of Kiritimati in the Pacific, monitoring the effects of climate change and El Nino on a delicate coral reef there.

One year earlier, she and her students had begun a survey of reefs around Kiritimati in the central Pacific Ocean.

The unexpected recovery on Kiritimati provides new hope, Baum says, “because it means that even under prolonged heat waves, there’s a path forward for some of them.”

The “jaw dropper” on Kiritimati, Baum says, was that many brain and star corals recovered from bleaching while the water was still unusually warm.