IMAGIRYING tO live in a ed by di aste or smell and is so variable in its properties t it is generally benign but at otimes sly lets state, it    scald you or freeze you. In tain anic molecules it    form carbonic acids so nasty t trip trees aatuary. In bulk, ed, it    strike no and. Even for to live , it is anoften murderous substance. e call it er.

        ater is everyo is 80 pert er, a co, a bacterium 75pert. A tomato, at 95 pert, is little but er. Even    er,making us more liquid t to oer is strauff. It isformless and transparent, a o be beside it. It aste a aste of it. e ravel great distances and pay small fortuo see it in suns is dangerous and droens of t    to froli it.

        Because er is so ubiquitous end to overlook raordinary substa is.

        Almost not it    be used to make reliable predis about ties of oter and based your assumptions on t co it—ably—you    it to boil at minus 135 degrees Fa and to be a gas at roomtemperature.

        Most liquids    by about 10 pert. ater does too, but only doo apoint. O is ance of freezing, it begins—perversely, beguilingly,extremely improbably—to expand. By time it is solid, it is almost a tent    expands, ice floats on er—“an utterly bizarreproperty,” acc to Jo lacked ttom up. it surface ice to    in,ter’s e a even g yet more ice.

        Soo certainly stay t ime,probably forever—ions to nurture life. ter seemsunary or laws of physics.

        Everyone kno er’s c it sists of onelargisom taco it. tomsg fiercely to t, but also make casual bonds er molecules.

        ture of a er molecule means t it engages in a kind of dance ermolecules, briefly pairing and tners in a quadrille,to use Robert Kunzig’s nice per may not appear terribly lively, but everymolecule in it is ers billions of times a sed. t’s ick togeto form bodies like puddles and lakes, but not so tig t be easilyseparated as o a pool of t any given moment only 15pert of tually toug.

        In one serong—it is s on a car ermination to beadners. It is also    ttracted more poo to tes a sort of membrarong enougo support is andskipping stones. It is ing to a belly flop.

        I    out t     it. Deprived of er, t. itated, to s lengtracts around to prevent blinking.”

        ater is so vital to us t it is easy to overlook t all but t fra of teroo us—deadly poisonous—because of ts .

        e need salt to live, but only in very small amounts, and seaer tains    seventy times more—salt tabolize. A typical liter of seaer ain only about 2.5 teaspoons of on salt—t mucs of ots, pounds, and otively knos. tions of ts and minerals in our tissues isunily similar to seaer— and cry seaer, as Margulis and Sagan it—but curiously    tolerate t. take a lot of salt into your body andyour metabolism very quickly goes into crisis. From every cell, er molecules ruseer firemen to try to dilute and carry off take of salt. t of ter to carry out tions. ted. Ireme situations, deion o seizures,unsciousness, and brain damage. Meanotually bee over funingkidneys you die. t is er.

        ter o is all o get.

        tem is closed: practically speaking, notracted. ter youdrink s job si least more or less) aes.

        ter realm is kno is over of all ter oer part of it in t and is bigger t togetoget over er (51.6 pert to be precise); tlantid t, leaving just 3.6 pert to be ated forby all t a t deeper tlantid Indian Os. Altoget oft’s surface is o more tes, ter callour pla    ater.

        Of t of Earter t is fres exists as ice ss. Only tiamount—0.036 pert—is found in lakes, rivers, and reservoirs, and an even smaller part—just 0.001 pert—exists in clouds or as vapor. Nearly 90 pert of t’s ice is inAntarctica, and most of t is in Greenland. Go to tanding on nearly t t fiftee of it. Antarctica aloneo raise t of t all melted. But if all ter in tmospheos would deepen by only an inch.

        Sea level, ially, is an almost entirely notional cept. Seas are not level at all.

        tides, s alter er levels siderably from oo anot a foot and a s ern edge—a sequence al force created by t aser ter tends to flooant toe er up against ternmargins.

        sidering tance of to us, it is striking    took to take a stifiterest in til o teentury most of    t    ten e and supposition tisuralist Edtlantid Mediterranean and declared t t all in t. It seemed a reasonable assumption. t at t deptlife, a suco be extreme. So it came assomet transatlantic telegrap o be ted ritus.

        t really anized iigation of t e until 1872, ioisy, and tis setfortsmouters, ing fiss. It ly dreary    of a plement of 240 stists and cre mad—“driven to distra by tine of years ing” in torian Samantt 70,000 nautical miles of sea, collected over 4,700 neion to create a fifty-volume report (een years to put togetific discipline:

        oograps, t tobe submerged mountains in tlantic, prompting some excited observers to speculatet t ti of Atlantis.

        Because titutional ly ig fell to devoted—and veryoccasional—amateurs to tell us er exploration beginsis Barton in 1930. Altners, tten attention. Born in 1877 into a o-do family in Ney, Beebe studied zoology at bia Uy, took ajob as a birdkeeper at ty. tiring of t, o adoptturer and for t quarter tury traveled extetractive female assistants ec” or “assistant in fised titles like Edge of table books on hology.

        In trip to ts ofdangling,” as eron, ure. Alts t, it    Barton    of itsstru. It iny and necessarily robust c iron 1.5 ining quartz blocks t only if to bee extremely ed. Even by tandards of tecicated. ty—it simply    primitive breatem: to ralize t out open s of soda lime, and to absorb moisture tub of calcium cimes o ences.

        But ttle bat eo do. On t dive, inJune 1930 in ton and Beebe set a o 600 feet. By1934, to 3,028 feet, ay until after ton to a dept, train on every bolt andrivet     a    3,000 feet, ttle ported to een tons of pressure persquare inc sutaneous, as Beebe never failed toobserve in icles, and radio broadcasts. t training to o a metal ball and tons of steel cable,o t, nothem.

        ts didn’t produce    deal of hwhile sce.

        Altered many creatures t    been seen before, ts ofvisibility and t t repid aquanauts rained oograpten    able to describe tail t real stistscraved. t carry aernal ligt bulb to t ter beloically imperable anyo it tz, so anyto vieerested in t. About all t, inseque of straartled to spy a giant serpent “more ty feet long and very passed too sly to be more tever it    s were generally ignored byacademics.

        After t of 1934, Beebe lost i in diving and moved on tootures, but Barton persevered. to , Beebe alold anyone on erprise, but Barton seemed uo step fromtoo, e ts of ter adventures and even starredin a itans of turing a batingand largely fialized enters    squid and tised Camel cigarettes (“t give me jittery nerves”). In 1948 , o 4,500 feet in ttermio overlook itans of tually t tar of ton is lucky to get a mention.

        At all events,    to be preeam fromSzerland, Auguste and Jacques Piccard, ”). ed trieste, after talian city in , tly, t did little more t go up anddos first dives, in early 1954, it desded to belo, nearly times Barton’s record-breaking dive of six years earlier. But deep-sea dives required a greatdeal of costly support, and the Piccards were gradually going broke.

        In 1958, t left trol. No    ttle more than peepholes.

        But it rong enougo and truly enormous pressures, and in January 1960Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don also ttom of t yon, tren Pacifid discovered, not ially, by er). It took just under fouro fall 35,820 feet, or almost seven miles. Alt t depticed    turbed a bottom-dfis as toucies for taking pograp.

        After just ty mi t point, turo t he only occasion on which human beings have gone so deep.

        Forty years later, tion t naturally occurs is: obegin emperament, forceful vie pertily, trol of tmental derer exploration a e of resources and poi t t a researcitute. tion, moreover,    to beefully preoccupied ravel and t to send a man to tigations seem unimportant and rat tion    trieste dest didn’t actually acer: “e didn’t learn a    from it, ot .

        again?” It o go to find a flatfisoo.

        Repeating today, it imated,    at least $100 million.

        er researtion of pursuing apromised exploratiram, tcry. Partly to placate its critics, to be operated by titution of Massacts. Called Alvin, in someracted     go a one problem: t find anyone o build it. Acc to illiam J. Broad io take on a project disparaged by be.” Eventually, not to say improbably, Alvin ructed byGeneral Mills, t a factory o producebreakfast cereals.

        As for tle idea. ell into t maps available to oograptle detail fromscattered surveys going back to 1929 grafted onto, essentially an o of guess cs o guide submaris, but it didn’t o fall into Soviet    kept its knoo make do ciquated surveys or relyon oday our knoion. If you look at tandard backyard telescope you antial craters—Fracastorious, Blanus, Zaylunar stist—t termaps of Mars than we do of our own seabeds.

        At tigative tecrifle ad y-four t overboard from a Korean cargo sorm in to Vietnam, o trace currents more accurately they ever had before.

        today Alvin is nearly forty years old, but it still remains America’s premier research vessel.

        till no submersibles t    go any’s surface. A typical submersible costsabout $25,000 a day to operate, so to ter on a    to sea in t tumble on someterest. It’s ratractors after dark. Acc to Robert Kunzig, inized“perhe sea’s darkness. Maybe less. Maybe much less.”

        But oograp industrious, and tantdiscoveries ed resources—including, in 1977, one of t important andstartling biological discoveries of tietury. In t year Alvin found teemingies of large anisms living on and around deep-sea vents off tube e long, clams a foot i eo vast ies 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 plex anisms could survive in er    130 degrees, and    emperatures t areme cold to boot. transformed our uanding of ts for life.

        It also ans puzzles of oograp 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, aually    er is blo again tacks. t s—it    take up to ten million years to    an o—but itis marvelously effit as long as you are not in a hurry.

        Pereness from t ternational Geopo study “tivees.” t a secret assig, you uand, 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 seerustiions or standing outside factories, ective linings of anytype. o sink, olet er in (and, of course, plutonium, uranium, and strontium out). Before it ed States o aboutfifty o sites—almost fifty t tic dumpers were Russia, s of Europe.

        And    migtle, ually oundingly, sumptuously, radiantly ignorant of lifebe substantial o creatures are often remarkably little knoo us—including t mig blue    (to quote David Attenbs “tongue s    is ts blood vessels are so    you coulds is t gargantua t Eart produced, bigger event cumbrous dinosaurs. Yet tery to us.

        Mucime ance, ores to get t little    entirely fromeavesdropping on t even tery. Blue    up again at t six monter. Sometimes trike up which each already knows.

        remotely uood. And t must routinely eto to breathe.

        For animals t need never surface, obscurity    be even more tantalizing. sider t squid. t is a decidedly substantialanimal, railiacles t    reacyfeet. It    iebrate. If you dumped one in a normal be muo stist—no person as far as s edcareers t to capture, or just glimpse, living giant squid and ly from bei in large numbers because tral part of t, and sperm    of feeding.

        1Acc to oimate, ty million species of animalsliving in t still undiscovered. t    of    life is in t e until as retly as tion of t captures anisms not just on a also buried ints beraial s a deptunder a mile, oods    ted over25,000 creatures—arfising 365 species.

        Even at a deptures representing almost 200species anism. But ture t oo sloupid toget out of te 1960s a marine biologist named Jo tolo attaco it, and found still more, in particular dense sive eel-like creature, as ing shoals of grenadier fish.

        aom—as many as 390 species of marine creature .

        Iingly, many of tures o s up to a tant. types as mussels and clams, ravelers. It is no t tain anisms may drift ter until, by some unkno t t a foodopportunity and fall onto it.

        So ax to begin    uniformly bounteous. Altogetenturally productive. Most aquatic species like to be ier to prime tance, stitute    of t are o about 25pert of its fish.

        Elseralia. itline and almost nine million square miles of territorial ers, it ssry, yet, as tim Flannery notes, it doesn’t even make it into topfifty among fisions. Indeed, Australia is a large    importer of seafood. tralia’s ers are, like mucralia itself, essentially desert. (Anotable exception is t Barrier Reef off Queensland,    produces little in trient-rich runoff.

        Even eremely sensitive to disturbance. In tralia and, to a lesser extent, Nele-kno ial sible parts of giant squid, in particular te in sperm ano time you spray on Co reflect t you are dousing yourself in distillate of unseen sea monster.

        rouged i all, fissris s madesome alarming discoveries. Rougremely long lived and sl. Some maybe 150 years old; any rougen may yle because ters ters, some fis on a lifetime. Clearly tions t ot stand a great deal of disturbance. Unfortunately, by time tocks ed. Even    it ions recover, if they ever do.

        Elseent.

        Many fis is, slice to terto die. In 1998, s for over $250 a pound. A bookyo for $100. timated in 1994 t tween 40 million and 70 million.

        As of 1995, some 37,000 industrial-sized fis a million smaller boats,aking ty-five yearsearlier. traimes noter plao locate she air.

        It is estimated t about a quarter of every fis ains “by-cat’t be landed because too small or of type or caugold t: “e’re still in t drop a doy-tris of suced fisly in ted, about four pounds of fisures aredestroyed.

        Large areas of traimes a year, a degree of disturba no ecosystem    and. At least timates, are being overfislantic tter.    once abounded in sudividual boatscould land ty t in a day. inct off t coast of North America.

        Note of cod. In te fifteentury, t found cod in incredible numbers on tern banks of Norter popular tom-feeding fis.

        Gees Banks off Massacts is bigger tate it abuts. till and for turies to be inexible. Of course t.

        By 1960, tlantic o aimated 1.6millioris. By 1990 to 22,000 metris. In ercial terms, tinct. “Fise Mark Kurlansky in ing ory, Cod, “ t tern Atlantic forever. In 1992, cod fisopped altoget as of last autumn, acc to a report inNature, stocks    staged a eback. Kurlansky    ts and fisicks    tely byPacific pollock. tes drily, “fisever is left.”

        Mue to ers y pounds. Sometimes ty pounds. Left ued, lobsters    live for decades—as mucyyears, it is t—and top groers ure. “Biologists,” acc to times, “estimate t 90pert of lobsters are cauger t aboutage six.” Despite deing catue to receive state andfederal tax iives t ence t pel to acquirebigger boats and to    tensively. today fists arereduced to fis market in t, buteven their numbers are now falling.

        e are remarkably ignorant of t rule life in t ougo be i urally impoverisers t to be. tarcticaproduly about 3 pert of toplankton—far too little, it osupport a plex ecosystem, a does. Crab-eater seals are not a species of animal tmost of us    tually be t numerous large species ofanimal oer een million of tarctica. t least op    some works. Remarkably no one knows how.

        All t    t tle about Eart system. But to us, once you start talkingabout life, t deal    k    got going in t place.
请记住本书首发域名：966xs.com。966小说手机版阅读网址：wap.966xs.com