Only a little today is banal enough, as that no day has been to call for that purpose. On 5. July, we celebrate the international day of the Bikinis. This is reminiscent of the date in the year 1946, French car engineer and textile designer Louis Réard presented his two-piece swimwear creation. Completely new is the idea was not. On ancient mosaics, young women are shown in such clothing, and also Eva Braun wore the like according to received private film recordings already in 1940.
Ulf von rauchhaupt
Responsible for the Department of “science,” the Frankfurt General Sunday newspaper.
F. A. Z.
Réards stroke of genius, especially of the exotic was a promising Name. Had to “Bikini” colonial officials in German new Guinea the name of an Atoll in the North-West of the Marshall Islands, that is to say, on Mars, hall table, actually, “Pikinni”, which means “coconut area”. In the summer of 1946, the coral ring of the world was to become known as the Americans on 1. July where they conducted their first nuclear weapons test after the end of the war. Up to 1958, the Bikini was maltreated after that of 22 other nuclear explosions, including the infamous “Castle Bravo”Test in 1954, a hydrogen bomb was two and a half times more violent detonated as planned. At the end of 22 of the original 25 islets of the Atoll left.
Radioactive coconuts
How long Bikini remained after 1958, a post-apocalyptic Wasteland, is, however, unknown. The American botanist Raymond Fosberg of the Smithsonian Institution, visited the Atoll in 1985, and wrote the first (and until today last) report on the plant world in a Bikini. Previously had looked only Randolph Taylor of the University of Michigan there, and shortly before the first nuclear weapons test. Fosberg found 56 species of plants, 24 more than Taylor, and only nine were missing, which are listed in Taylor. Some of the smaller islets, however, must be from the explosions, in particular, Castle Bravo, completely sterilized have been There only young pioneer plants were found, especially the velvet-leaf Heliotropium foertherianum and the fan flower Scaevola sericea. Both are among the 26 native species, and the others have brought people to the Atoll, five of the Polynesians, including the coconut palm.
Of the Coconut plantations, the explosions were left with hardly anything. The now-growing palms have planted those Bikinianer, which were allowed to return in 1972 again, only to be 1978 again evacuated, as it turned out, that drinking water and fruit were still charged far too much, and are up to today. Since 1996, may after all, be immersed in the weapons tests, a sunken war ships make the Bikini a sought-after destination with money to spend under the water sports enthusiasts, who can however, still eat anything that grows on the Islands. The flowers should be abandoned, therefore, also better, although the white fan flowers quite a bit here, as well as the orange flowers of the plants of the Borage counting tree, Cordia subcordata, or the Losbäume the kind of Clerodendrum inerme. These beauties are all indigenous, if not endemic, because the Atolls, such as Bikini are too young, than to his own species would have been able to develop. A special feature of the Bikini-Flora noticed Fosberg, however: “Some species,” he wrote, “show an unusual size and Luxuriance.” An explanation for this, he had not.