Yale Environment 360: In 2000, Gregory Stone, an oceanographer at the New England Aquarium, went diving in the Phoenix Islands, an uninhabited archipelago belonging to Kiribati in the remote central Pacific. The multi-colored reefs swarmed with sharks and other large predators, an abundance shared by perhaps only a handful of remote atolls around the equator.
We were completely blown away, Stone recalled. It was the first time I had seen what the ocean may have looked like thousands of years ago.
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