"The missing corals are fragile lagoonal specialists—slender branching or leafy forms that you only find in the sheltered waters of a lagoon," says Zoe Richards of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University. Bikini Atoll has been unpopulated and largely unvisited in the decades since the blasts, and reveals how in the absence of more modern stressors like overfishing and overpopulation some corals have the capacity to recover from vast upheavals. Because of its incredible history and current undisturbed character, Bikini Atoll is now the focus of an ongoing effort to list the northern Marshall Island atolls as a World Heritage Site.

Hope the US is spearheading and funding that effort. Seems the least we can do.

Julia Whitty is Mother Jones' environmental correspondent, lecturer, and 2008 winner of the Kiriyama Prize and the John Burroughs Medal Award. You can read from her new book, The Fragile Edge, and other writings, here.