Sitting back here in the UK, after twenty-five hours of back-to-back flights, whilst looking at this shot of us all on the now uninhabited Bikini Island, it's hard to believe we all pulled this off.
An idea that was seeded over a few beers, almost seventeen years ago, at The Explorers Club in New York with an old friend, Dr. John Malone who ran with it, pulled in Jonathan Shafter and Dr. Christopher Mason and the team at BioAstra, The Colossal Foundation, The Extreme Microbiome Project and created an expedition arm of BioAstra called 'XX500' to make it a reality.
This was an epic expedition that took us to the northern most atolls of the Marshall islands, contaminated by the atomic bomb tests of the 1940's and 50's.
It involved sampling on land, whilst dodging giant 'monster' coconut crabs, and taking core samples underwater, including a very sharky dive at the edge of the Castle Bravo crater, and then sequencing the DNA on board the boat we had chartered for the expedition.
Something which would have seemed impossible only a few years ago.
Already a couple of hundred new species of extremophiles have been discovered and the real lab work hasn't even started yet.
The expedition was made all the better by the amazing team on board, from Joe and his amazing crew and divemasters aboard The Taka to the fellow expeditioners and scientists and Marshallese students; Dr. Stefan Green, Dr. Jesse Salk, Dr. Cody Paige, Dr. Sara Kahanamoku, Fern Lehman Stege, Geoffrey Teillon, Atlee Teillon, Thong Wei Koh, Dr. S. Robin Elgart, Dr. Timothy A. Mousseau, Maddie and of course Barry Clark-Ewers who's adventure started in Ebeye before we even boarded the boat (his stories had us all in tears of laughter). And not forgetting Patricia (Savi) Glowe and Scott Tighe back in the US who provided much needed support at every step along the way.
With the majority of the expedition undertaken at the edge of Typhoon Dolphin, the rough seas and large swells made life aboard a small boat, let's just say 'challenging', but everyone had a smile on their face even if they were not feeling it inside.
New dive sites visited, new species discovered and new friends made. What more can you ask for.