  Investigating nucleon-nucleon correlations inherent to the strong nuclear
force is one of the core goals in nuclear physics research. We showcase the
unique opportunities offered by collisions of $^{16}$O nuclei at high-energy
facilities to reveal detailed many-body properties of the nuclear ground state.
We interface existing knowledge about the geometry of $^{16}$O coming from
\textit{ab-initio} calculations of nuclear structure with transport simulations
of high-energy $^{16}$O+$^{16}$O collisions. Bulk observables in these
processes, such as the elliptic flow or the fluctuations of the mean transverse
momentum, are found to depend significantly on the input nuclear model and to
be sensitive to realistic clustering and short-range repulsive correlations,
effectively opening a new avenue to probe these features experimentally. This
finding demonstrates collisions of oxygen nuclei as a tool to elucidate initial
conditions of small collision systems while fostering connections with
effective field theories of nuclei rooted in quantum chromodynamics (QCD).
