van thillo: we were in the south pacific. we were sailing past the phoenix islands, and we had just heard that "national geographic" had been there a year earlier, and they hailed it as being the most beautiful reef and most amazing place to go. so our crew said, "let's go there, check it out, and we'll take a break and we'll go diving on fantastic reefs." and as they arrived there, they found that almost the entire reef was dead. man: 2004, 2005, the middle of the ocean, the phoenix islands in the middle of the ocean, the nation of kiribati, had this extraordinary hot spot that developed over it for 6 months. it was like some creature had a magnifying glass and just was burning a hole in the ocean in that spot, right along the equatorial pacific. corals bleached, died. my colleagues stopped counting corals, dead corals, after they got to something like 1,900 dead corals. we thought corals in the middle of the ocean were protected because the stress was coming from the land around them, and that was, like, ringing the real al