Word: benthic
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...billion-year-old legacy--the living history of the world--and that we are blithely squandering our inheritance by way of pollution and overfishing. What is more: there is so much left to see in the oceans. The few existing manned submersibles can reach only half their depth. The benthic, or bottom-dwelling, plants and animals represent the least-known ecosystem on the planet. Earle feels personal responsibility for the ocean's future and safety. She takes fish personally. She once bumped into "a grouper with an attitude...
...project might have occupied part of a Saturday afternoon. Instead, as the author relates in the preamble to his spectacularly orogenous and deeply benthic volume Annals of the Former World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 696 pages; $35), it required most of the next 20 years. It morphed from one road cut to a nation of them across the continental trail of Interstate 80, and from one bemused geologist to dozens. Readers had stamina then, and over the years the New Yorker printed McPhee's emerging rock opera as a succession of four-parters: Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from...
...intuitive writers, or the most intuitive of methodicals. Intuition tells him to bang a gong from time to time, and he does: "The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone." Full stop. Paragraph break. While this astonishment reverberates, he goes on methodically to discuss orogeny, which is mountain building (benthic refers to the ocean bottom). He was an English major who had written about gold mining in Alaska without, as he admits, knowing how the gold got there to be mined. Neither did the miners. But he pestered geologists for an explanation, and had the good luck to apply...
...roam the depths without human intervention for months on end. Although they cannot yet provide real-time pictures, they can stay on the bottom as long as a year, patiently accumulating data. Two American AUVS--a government- and university-funded craft called Odyssey and Woods Hole's Autonomous Benthic Explorer--have just completed tests off the coast of Washington and Oregon. Eventually, fleets of these robots could communicate among themselves to provide information in the most efficient way, periodically surfacing to beam their data to researchers on shore...
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