Bikini Atoll
— — a turquoise lagoon that holds the century's hardest history.
Not only on a wall.
“A ring of low coral islets around a lagoon roughly 40 kilometres wide, in the Ralik Chain of the Marshall Islands. The 167 people who lived on Bikini were moved away in 1946 so the United States could use the atoll as a nuclear weapons test site. Twenty-three devices were detonated here between 1946 and 1958, including the 1954 Castle Bravo shot, the largest American test ever. The lagoon is quiet now and reads brilliant turquoise from the air. UNESCO listed the atoll in 2010. from the studio
Bikini Atoll, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Bikini Atoll is a coral atoll in the Ralik Chain of the Marshall Islands, roughly 850 kilometres northwest of Majuro and about 4,000 kilometres southwest of Honolulu. The atoll consists of 23 small islets arranged around a central lagoon some 40 kilometres across at its widest, with a total land area of only about 6 square kilometres. The Republic of the Marshall Islands is an independent nation in free association with the United States. UNESCO inscribed Bikini Atoll on its World Heritage list in 2010 as a direct material reflection of the dawn of the nuclear age.
The 167 Bikinians were relocated by the United States Navy in March 1946 to make way for nuclear testing under Operation Crossroads. Between 1946 and 1958 the United States detonated 23 nuclear devices on, in, and above the atoll. The Castle Bravo shot of 1 March 1954 yielded 15 megatons, more than twice its predicted yield, and remains the largest nuclear test ever conducted by the United States. Fallout from Bravo contaminated the inhabited atolls of Rongelap and Utirik downwind and the Japanese fishing vessel Daigo Fukuryu Maru. Bikini's original residents and their descendants have not been able to return to live on the atoll.
The lagoon now holds one of the world's most consequential collections of underwater wrecks. Operation Crossroads in 1946 was designed in part to test nuclear effects against warships, and the target fleet sunk in or near the lagoon includes the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, the Japanese battleship Nagato, the German cruiser Prinz Eugen, and the battleships USS Arkansas and USS Pennsylvania. Saratoga sits upright in about 52 metres of water with her flight deck intact, the only diveable aircraft carrier on Earth. Visitor access has been intermittent, run through small expedition operations licensed by the Bikini Atoll Local Government and dependent on radiation monitoring on land.