ABSTRACT
The first major testing site for atomic weapons was in the Marshall Islands, in the Pacific Ocean, called the Pacific Proving Grounds (PPG). Early attempts at assessing the impacts of the detonations focused on the marine biota of the coral reef. However, the impact of radioactive fallout from one of the first hydrogen bomb tests contaminated local people and the islands they were living on, which caused the ecological monitoring efforts to expand to terrestrial habitats of the coral reef atolls. A number of the modern approaches for studying tropical coral reefs evolved from work originally done at the PPG.
