2024-10-24
5 分钟The Economist Hello, Alok Jha here.
I host Babbage, our science and tech podcast.
Welcome to Editors' Picks.
Here's an article handpicked from the latest edition of The Economist, read aloud.
I thought you might enjoy it.
More is known about the surface of Mars than the floor of the ocean.
By one count, America spends 150 times more on space exploration than ocean research.
Scientists have mapped almost every Martian crater, but only about 20% of the seabed.
Yet interest in the ocean is growing.
A trio of new books plunge into the deep.
They journey through the bioluminescent realm of the Twilight Zone,
between 200 to 1,000 meters,
and into the murky depths of the Midnight Zone, 1,000 to 4,000 metres.
Susan Casey, a Canadian writer, ventures even further into the abyss.
In The Underworld,
she describes her trip to an underwater volcano off the coast of Hawaii in 2021,
alongside Victor Vescovo, an explorer.
When the deep-sea submersible parked 5,017 metres down,
she found a world of languid beauty.
On the pale gold seabed were obsidian rocks with patches of neon orange and sea cucumbers grazing like tiny translucent purple cows.