4.0
Open LibraryAbout this book
Prior to John Ross's successful retrieval in 1818 of six pounds of worm-filled mud from the bottom of Baffin Bay, it was widely believed that no life could possibly flourish in the dark, cold, pressurized waters of the deep Atlantic Ocean. Subsequent expeditions - conducted on ships with trawls, in submersibles such as William Beebe's bathysphere and Jacques Cousteau's Deepstar, and by remote-controlled and robotic diving devices - have unveiled a mind-boggling menagerie, a riot of deep-sea fauna with which we are still only marginally acquainted. Even today, only a handful of people have seen the pillow lava, smoking chimneys, and shimmering water of the hydrothermal vent fields, which are colonized by blind white crabs, clams as big as footballs, and gigantic tube worms with vivid red gills. Only a lucky few explorers of the abyss have encountered Vampyroteuthis infernalis, the "vampire squid from hell," with its complex clusters of photophores that it can turn on and off at will. A mere smattering of marine biologists have witnessed the herds of pulsating sea cucumbers that feed contentedly in the sand and mud of the Atlantic floor. And the same is true for the amazing pelican eel, whose body consists almost entirely of toothless mouth, and for the four-inch-long male anglerfish that permanently attaches himself to the nearly four-foot-long female. . In the strikingly illustrated Deep Atlantic, Richard Ellis brings us face-to-face with these unexpected efflorescences of evolution - fish, mammals, and members of other phyla that have been able to assume incredible sh…
Themes & subjects
Abyssal zoneMarine ecologyDeep-sea soundingHistoryMarine biologyOcean bottom
First published 1996Setting
Atlantic Ocean
About the author
Richard Ellis
2 April 1938
Richard Ellis is an American marine biologist, author, and illustrator. He is a research associate in the American Museum of Natural History's division of paleontology, special adviser to the American Cetacean Society, and a member of the Explorers Club. He was U.S. delegate to International Whaling Commission from 1980 to 1990. His paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, and his murals can be seen in the Denver Museum of Natural History, the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts, and Whaleworld, a museum in Albany, Western Australia. He is the author of more than 100 magazine articles, which have appeared in leading magazines such as National Geogra…
Reviews
No reviews yet — be the first to write one from the Log screen.
Quotes
No quotes yet.
