ert Kunzig, inized“perhe sea’s darkness. Maybe less. Maybe much less.”
But oceanograp industrious, and tantdiscoveries ed resources—including, in 1977, one of t important andstartling biological discoveries of tietury. In t year Alvin found teemingcolonies of large organisms living on and around deep-sea vents off tube en feet long, clams a foot i ence to vast colonies of bacteria tenance from oxic to surface creatures—t eadily from ts. It of sunliged em based not on posynt on c tbiologists it.
s of and energy flos. togetation, and temperatures around temperature at t of outfloer may be only three degrees above freezing.
A type of emperature 140 degrees its its tail. Before t tno complex organisms could survive in er 130 degrees, and emperatures t and extreme cold to boot. transformed our understanding of ts for life.
It also ans puzzles of oceanograp many of usdidn’t realize ier ime. At tating t of salt in to bury every bit of land on t to a dept five . Millions of gallons of freser evaporate fromts be to groy t. Sometakes an amount of salt out of terequivalent to t being put in. For t time, no one could figure out his.
Alvin’s discovery of ts provided ts realized t ts ing mucers in a fisank. As er is taken doo t,salts are stripped from it, and eventually clean er is blo again tacks. t s—it can take up to ten million years to clean an ocean—but itis marvelously efficient as long as you are not in a hurry.
Pereness from t ternational Geopo study “tivees.” t a secret assignment, you understand, but a proud public boast. In fact,t mucive es ain appalling vigor, for over a decade. Since 1946, ted Statesy-five-gallon drums of radioactive gunk out to ty miles off t near San Francisco, hemoverboard.
It e extraordinarily sloppy. Most of tly t you seerusting beations or standing outside factories, ective linings of anytype. o sink, olet er in (and, of course, plutonium, uranium, and strontium out). Before it ed State