Posts Tagged ‘exploration’
“We can only sense that in the deep and turbulent recesses of the sea are hidden mysteries far greater than any we have solved.”*…
A new study finds that the vast majority of the deep sea floor remains undocumented. Nell Greenfieldboyce report…
Bizarre creatures like vampire squid and blobfish make their home in the dark, cold, depths of the deep sea, but most of this watery realm remains a complete mystery.
That’s because humans have seen less than 0.001% of the globe’s deep seafloor, according to a new study.
In fact, the area of the deep seafloor that’s been directly visualized is roughly equivalent to the state of Rhode Island, researchers report in the journal Science Advances.
Maps created with tools like sonar can show the shape of the seafloor, but it’s much harder to send cameras down beyond 200 meters, or more than 656 feet, where sunlight begins to fade rapidly and the waters turn cold and dark. This is the region of the ocean that’s considered “deep.”
“The fact of the matter is, when you’re down there with a remotely operated vehicle or other sort of deep-submergence vehicle, you can only see a very tiny bit of the deep sea floor at any one time,” says Katy Croff Bell of the nonprofit Ocean Discovery League, who led this new research…
… To try to get a better accounting of the total area of the deep seafloor that’s been observed so far, she and her colleagues created a database of all known efforts. They found records of more than 43,000 trips down, starting in 1958, with everything from robotic vehicles to human-driven subs to simple landers that didn’t move around.
It turns out that most of the exploratory expeditions occurred within 200 nautical miles of the United States, Japan, and New Zealand. Those three countries, along with France and Germany, led nearly all of the efforts.
As a result, scientists really haven’t seen a very representative sample of what’s going on around the globe…
… Bell says we don’t know what habitats might yet be discovered — and that even though the deep ocean might be out of sight and out of mind for most people, the currents down there bring oxygen and key nutrients up towards the surface.
“All of these things are connected, and impact us in so many different ways,” she says.
What little has been explored beneath the deep ocean suggests that it can have dramatically different ecosystems that support very different kinds of living things. Already, in the ocean, explorers have seen hot hydrothermal vents, alkaline vents, and cold seeps.
“But given how little we’ve seen and how biased it is, we can’t really give you a global map of all the habitats of the deep sea, because we just haven’t been to all of them,” she says.
Past explorations to the deep have revealed completely unexpected forms of life. For example, in the 1970’s, researchers discovered microbes at hydrothermal vents that did not depend at all on the sun and photosynthesis, and instead got their energy from chemical reactions.
“That was completely revolutionary and completely rewrote all the science books,” she says.
Geologist and deep sea expert Jeffrey Karson of Syracuse University, who wasn’t part of this research team, says this is the first time he’s ever seen a well-documented number that really encapsulates what’s been seen of the deep ocean floor so far.
He would have assumed the area seen by humanity was less than 1% of the total, he says, but was still surprised the faction would be “such a tiny number.”
“We’re spending a lot of money to try to understand other planets, maybe planets outside of our solar system. And yet right here on our own planet, we know so little of what’s going on in this area that covers about two-thirds of our planet,” says Karson. “Almost every time we go there, we learn something new and exciting, and many of our discoveries on the seafloor have been serendipitous. So, you know, we’re feeling our way in the dark, literally, there.”..
We’re asleep to the deep: “Humans still haven’t seen 99.999% of the deep seafloor,” from @ngreenfieldboyce.bsky.social and @npr.org.
* Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us (1951)
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As we dive deep, we might spare a thought for Robert S. Dietz; he died on this date in 1995. A marine geologist, geophysicist, and oceanographer with the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, he developed (in 1961) a theory of seafloor spreading (a term he coined), in which new crustal material continually upwells from the Earth’s depths along the mid-ocean ridges and spreads outward at a rate of several inches per year.
“The sacred moon overhead / Has taken a new phase”*…
As Oliver Hawkins and Peggy Hollinger report, an analysis of commercial radio spectrum filings shows a growing number of players– government agencies, but increasingly private companies– bettting on the emergence of a lunar economy…
Private companies are staking claims to radio spectrum on the Moon with the aim of exploiting an emerging lunar economy, Financial Times research has found.
More than 50 applications have been filed with the International Telecommunication Union since 2010 to use spectrum, the invisible highway of electromagnetic waves that enable all wireless technology, on or from the Moon.
Last year the number of commercial filings to the global co-ordinating body for lunar spectrum outstripped those from space agencies and governments for the first time, according to FT research. The filings cover satellite systems as well as missions to land on the lunar surface.
“We will look back and see this as an important inflection point,” said Katherine Gizinski, chief executive of spectrum consultancy River Advisers, which has filed for lunar spectrum for three satellite systems on behalf of other companies since 2021.
Although total registrations were lower in 2024 than the previous year, the increased proportion of commercial filings reflects a race to build the infrastructure that will enable the “cislunar economy”, the area between the Earth and Moon…
More on the players and the game: “The race to claim the Moon’s airwaves” (gift article), from @financialtimes.com. See also:
* William Butler Yeats, “The Cat and the Moon”
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As we linger over the lunar, we might recall that it was on this date in 1971 that NASA accomplished the third lunar EVA: Commander Alan B. Shepard and Lunar Module pilot Edgar D. Mitchell became the fifth and sixth men to walk on the Moon (in the lunar highlands near the crater Fra Mauro) as part of the Apollo 14 mission.
During this four-hour “activity,” they deployed the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP)– scientific experiments that were left on the lunar surface and other scientific and sample collection apparatus. B efore lifting off on the next day, the astronauts went on another moonwalk almost to the rim of nearby Cone crater, collecting 42.9 kg of samples along the traverse. At the end of this 3.45 km walk, Shepard used a contingency sampler with a Wilson 6-iron connected to the end to hit two golf balls.
“What is it about maps? I could look at them all day”*…
Jonn Elledge devotes the current issue of his nifty newsletter to a series of fascinating facts from his wonderful book, A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders (as it’s known in its U.S. edition, as compared to the less qualified title of the U.K. original pictured above)…
… Back in May, the good people at the UK’s leading maps and travel specialist bookshop Stanfords were kind enough to select my new book A History of the World in 47 Borders as their book of the month. And to promote it, they asked me to make a quick video, talking about it…
My initial thought was to list a single fact from each of the book’s 47 chapters, but that, I soon realised, would go on forever and take an absurd number of takes to get right. So in the end I decided on a top 10: that took an absurd number of takes to get right too, and also features me the wrong way round, for some reason, but at least it’s only three minutes long…
… as a special Christmas treat, not to mention shameless attempt to get more of you to buy the book for yourself or a loved one, here are all 47 of the facts I originally chose…
You’ll find tidbits like these:
The oldest known international border was the one between what today we call Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. We know about it today because, sometime around 3100BCE, someone abolished it.
The Great Wall is not really one wall, but many. And the first Chinese emperor used to kidnap young men to make them build them.
The Open Borders Policies of Genghis Khan basically created the modern world.
In 1884, the great powers agreed to divide up the entire map of Africa without ever visiting. No Africans were in attendance, and one who’d asked for an invite, the Sultan of Zanzibar, was openly laughed at.
There’s a piece of Africa which two countries, Egypt and Sudan, both aggressively claim belongs to the other.
There’s an opera house in which the US/Canada border divides audience from stage.
There’s a coral atoll a thousand miles from Japan which is technically classed as a suburb of Tokyo.
Air traffic control zones cover the entire planet except the Galapagos Islands and the bit of the Arctic where Santa lives.
So much more at “47 Facts from A History of the World in 47 Borders,” from @jonnelledge.bsky.social
* Bill Bryson
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As we muse on maps, we might send acutely observant birthday greetings to an astute student of the human animal, anthropologist Margaret Mead; she was born on this date in 1901. Best-known for her studies of the nonliterate peoples of Oceania, she was 23 when she first traveled to the South Pacific to conduct research for her doctoral dissertation. The book that resulted, Coming of Age in Samoa, was– and remains– a best-seller.
“Dust to dust”*…
Back in 2016, we visited Jay Owens and his fascinating newsletter on dust… which went silent a couple of years later. Those of us who missed it, and were worried about its author were relieved to learn that he’d pulled back in order to turn his thinking into a book. That book is now here: Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles, and The Guardian is here with an excerpt…
… Nobody normally thinks about dust, what it might be doing or where it should go: it is so tiny, so totally, absolutely, mundane, that it slips beneath the limits of vision. But if we pay attention, we can see the world within it.
Before we go any further, I should define my terms. What do I mean by dust? I want to say everything: almost everything can become dust, given time. The orange haze in the sky over Europe in the spring, the pale fur that accumulates on my writing desk and the black grime I wipe from my face in the evening after a day traversing the city. Dust gains its identity not from a singular material origin, but instead through its form (tiny solid particles), its mode of transport (airborne) and, perhaps, a certain loss of context, an inherent formlessness. If we knew precisely what it was made of, we might not call it dust, but instead dander or cement or pollen. “Tiny flying particles,” though, might suffice as a practical starting definition…
…
Dust is simultaneously a symbol of time, decay and death – and also the residue of life. Its meaning is never black or white, but grey and somewhat fuzzy. Living with dust – as we must – is a slow lesson in embracing contradiction: to clean, but not identify with cleanliness; to respect the material need for hygiene while distrusting it profoundly as a social metaphor…
A fascinating sample of a fascinating book: “Empire of dust: what the tiniest specks reveal about the world,” from @hautepop in @guardian.
Pair with: “Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand” and “In every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.”
* from the burial service in the Book of Common Prayer
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As we examine the elemental, we might send exploratory birthday greetings to Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt; he was born on this date in 1769. The younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, Alexander was a geographer, geologist, archaeologist, naturalist, explorer, and champion of Romantic philosophy. Among many other contributions to human knowledge, his quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography; he surveyed and collected geological, zoological, botanical, and ethnographic specimens, including over 60,000 rare or new tropical plants.
As a geologist, Humboldt made pioneering observations of geological stratigraphy, structure (he named the Jurassic System), and geomorphology; and he understood the connections between volcanism and earthquakes. His advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement laid the foundation for modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.
For more, see: The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World.
“Trees are sanctuaries”*…
John Lewis-Stempel recounts a day in the life of an oak and the creatures that call it home…
Our friends the trees have an unremarkable life, or so it seems to us. They come into leaf, their fruit drops, or is gorged on by birds and the winds of autumn strip them of their dressing to leave them as the cold, bare sentinels of winter.
However, if we were to stand, tree-like ourselves, in a British copse and watch a single oak tree for an entire 24 hours — say when spring hatches out of winter — what would we see?…
Among their deceptively inert branches, trees shelter feathered Pavarottis, scuttling beetles, opportunistic fungi and fierce owls. A quick– and delightful– course in woodland ecology: “A day in the life of an oak tree, from mistle thrush in the morning to mice at midnight,” from @JLewisStempel in @Countrylifemag.
* Herman Hesse
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As we deliberate on the deciduous, we might send fertile birthday greetings to John Bartram; he was born on this date in 1699. An American botanist, horticulturist, and explorer, based in Philadelphia for most of his career, he was judged by Swedish botanist and taxonomist Carl Linnaeus to be the “greatest natural botanist in the world.”
He started what is known as Bartram’s Garden in 1728 at his farm in Kingsessing (now part of Philadelphia)– considered the first botanic garden in the United States. His sons and descendants operated it until 1850; it still operates under a partnership between the city of Philadelphia and a non-profit foundation, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960.
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