Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited. from Google Maps Saint Andrew Beach: 97 Cumberland Island (Cumberland Island). Published on 06 April 2020.Įxcept where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Jekyll Island in Georgia is another gem where you can spend a Tybee boasts. Lauren Lipuma ( Program Manager, Media Relations, AGU He recounts the mesmerizing sequence of events triggered by the Baker detonation and explains how a tropical paradise became a battleship graveyard. In the latest episode of AGU’s podcast Third Pod from the Sun, Art tells the story of the Baker test and describes his experience diving through the lagoon’s many shipwrecks. The wrecks of sunken ships are still visible and still leaking fuel into the surrounding water, and it is unlikely anyone will be able to inhabit Bikini in the near future. University of Delaware professor Art Trembanis spent the summer of 2019 mapping the seafloor around Bikini to see if he could find evidence of the tests all these decades later.Īrt and his colleagues have so far discovered the craters from Baker and other tests have left permanent scars on the seafloor around the atoll. The original inhabitants of Bikini were evacuated prior to the tests, but the island was so contaminated by radioactivity from the blasts and pollutants released by the sunken ships that they have never been able to return. This map of the seafloor in Bikini’s lagoon shows the Baker test crater and various shipwrecks around the site. The Baker test was so different from every other detonation that researchers held a conference 2 months later to define all the new phenomena observed in the explosion. No remnant of the barge from which the bomb was suspended has ever been found. The remainder of the fleet was so contaminated with radiation that only 9 of Baker’s original 84 ships were able to be scrapped-the rest were deliberately sunk. Three major ships and several small aircraft were sunk within the first few days. A colossal column of boiling, radioactive water then poured over the array of target ships, tossing them about like toys in a bathtub. The underwater fireball created a supersonic shock wave that expanded outward and crushed the hulls of the closest ships. The Baker detonation left a crater on the seafloor roughly 800 meters (half a mile) wide and 10 meters (33 feet) deep.
It was the first nuclear bomb ever detonated underwater, and chemist Glenn Seaborg, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, called it “the world’s first nuclear disaster.” Glenn Seaborg, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, called it “the world’s first nuclear disaster.”īaker was far more destructive than the military had planned.
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