from the rims of extinct underwater volcanoes—he borrowed more or less
wholesale from a Russian naturalist named Johann Friedrich von
Eschscholtz. (Before Bikini Atoll became Bikini Atoll, it was called, rather
less enticingly, Eschsholtz Atoll.)
When his turn came to theorize about reefs, Darwin had the
advantage of actually having visited some. In November 1835, the Beagle
moored off Tahiti. Darwin climbed to one of the highest points on the
island, and from there he could survey the neighboring island of Moorea.
Moorea, he observed, was encircled by a reef the way a framed etching is
surrounded by a mat.
“I am glad that we have visited these islands,” Darwin wrote in his
diary, for coral reefs “rank high amongst the wonderful objects in the
world.” Looking over at Moorea and its surrounding reef, he pictured
time running forward; if the island were to sink away, Moorea’s reef
would become an atoll. When Darwin returned to London and shared his
subsidence theory with Lyell, Lyell, though impressed, foresaw
resistance. “Do not flatter yourself that you will be believed until you are
growing bald like me,” he warned.
In fact, debate about Darwin’s theory—the subject of his 1842 book The
Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs—continued until the nineteen-
fifties, when the U.S. Navy arrived in the Marshall Islands with plans to
vaporize some of them. In preparation for the H-bomb tests, the Navy
drilled a series of cores on an atoll called Enewetak. As one of Darwin’s
biographers put it, these cores proved his theory to be, in its large lines at
least, “astoundingly correct.”
Darwin’s description of coral reefs as “amongst the wonderful objects
of the world” also still stands. Indeed, the more that has been learned
about reefs, the more marvelous they seem. Reefs are organic paradoxes—
obdurate, ship-destroying ramparts constructed by tiny gelatinous
creatures. They are part animal, part vegetable, and part mineral, at once
teeming with life and, at the same time, mostly dead.
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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