Word: planetful
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Kurilskoye Lake, in the southern part of the peninsula, offers a glimpse of a paradise lost elsewhere on the planet. Sockeye salmon choke the mouths of streams, huge brown bears and their cubs feed on cloudberries in the surrounding sun-dappled meadows, while a giant stellar sea eagle rides the thermals on the flanks of one of the volcanoes ringing the lake. Boulders made of porous volcanic rock float at the edge of the lake, seemingly defying gravity. George Schaller, the renowned and famously dour American wildlife biologist, who is visiting the region to study brown bears, looks out over...
...Golden Road to Unlimited Devotion--a name that the Dead gratefully took as the title of the first song on its first album. Over time, Deadheads improvised their own vocabulary, infrastructure and code of honor. Mythologist Joseph Campbell said they were the most recently developed tribe on the planet...
...flat, featureless plain, the sea floor is rent and wrinkled with a topography that puts dry land to shame. Not only do the seas hold canyons deep enough to hide the Himalayas, but they are also the setting for what is by far the largest geologic feature on the planet: a single, globe-circling 31,000-mile-long mountain range that snakes its way continuously through the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Arctic oceans...
While academics think of the vents as fascinating natural chemistry labs, capitalists view them as mini-refineries, bringing valuable metals up from the planet's interior and concentrating them in convenient locations. Oceanographers have long known that parts of the Pacific sea floor at depths between 14,000 ft. and 17,000 ft. are carpeted with so-called manganese nodules, potato-size chunks of manganese mixed with iron, nickel, cobalt and other useful metals. In the 1970s, Howard Hughes used the search for nodules as a cover for building the ship Glomar Explorer, which was used to salvage a sunken...
...worms, breaking down other chemicals into usable food--an ecological niche nobody had suspected they could fill. Many biologists now believe that the very first organisms on earth were chemosynthetic as well, suggesting that the vents may well be the best laboratory available for studying how life on the planet actually began...