If People Were Dolphins, the Planet Would Be Called “Ocean” - Don't Know Much About Geography - page 83

Great Britain Situated off the coast of Europe, this is the main island in the United Kingdom, on which
England, Scotland, and Wales are located.
Ellesmere A barren, mountainous Canadian island in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Greenland, it is
notable for Cape Columbia, the northernmost point in North America.
Victoria Another Canadian island located in the Arctic Ocean.
Bikini: Which Came First, the Swimsuit or the Atoll?
The second type of oceanic island is the coral island. The coral polyp is a tiny sea creature that lives in a
shell in fairly shallow waters that are warm and clear. When the polyp dies, the softer parts of the body
are washed away, but the skeleton is left behind. New polyps grow on the shells of dead ones, eventually
forming a great mass of coral. An atoll is a coral reef that forms an almost complete circle around a lagoon.
The circular coral reefs of most atolls reach deep down into water where no coral can grow. They may
have been reefs in shallow water surrounding a volcano. As the island sinks, or the sea level changes, the
coral continues to grow. The original volcanic island disappears far below the lagoon, and the reef forms
an atoll.
Perhaps the world's most famous atoll is the Bikini Atoll, located in the Marshall Islands in the central
Pacific Ocean. From 1946 to 1958, it was the site of the forth and fifth atomic bomb detonations and
twenty-two subsequent United States nuclear bomb tests. The Bikini islanders, who had been evacuated
in February 1946, began to return in 1972, but the island was again declared uninhabitable because of the
high levels of radiation still evident in 1978. The islanders were again evacuated after having been subjec-
ted to the largest dose of plutonium ever monitored in a population.
A year after the first test, in the summer of 1947, a different sort of explosion rocked the world. On the
French Riviera, women began to wear a skimpy two-piece swimsuit that some unidentified genius decided
to call the bikini, after the island. Why the name was chosen is a geographical and fashion mystery. Maybe
the effect of the bikini on watchers was thought to be as explosive as an atomic bomb. Another suggestion
is that the woman wearing a bikini was left almost as bare as the islands after the bomb blasts. Whichever
reason it is, we can only be grateful that the tests weren't done on some other island. Somehow the notion
of going down to the beach to check out the latest styles in “guadalcanals” or “eniwetoks” just doesn't
have the right ring.
NAMES: Are There Canaries in the Canary Islands?
As with “bikini,” this is another chicken-or-egg type of question. The Canary Islands are a group of vol-
canic islands about sixty-five miles off the coast of northwest Africa. Still controlled by Spain, the princip-
al islands in the group are Tenerife, Palma, Gomera, Hierro, Grand Canary, Fuerteventura, and Lanzarote.
The Greeks were the first Europeans to reach them, but it was the Roman historian Pliny (the Elder) who
later named them Insulae Canariae , or “Islands of the Dogs,” because of the many large dogs that lived
there. The name canary was passed on to the wild finches native to the islands, which must make them
“dog birds,” the feathered world's answer to bird dogs.