Discovering the Deep. A photographic atlas of the seafloor and ocean crust / Открывая для себя глубины. Фотографический атлас морского дна и океанической коры

The deep oceans and global seafloor are truly Earth’s last frontier. They remain largely unexplored, yet are critical to our survival on this planet. This magnificent volume transports you to volcanoes, boiling hot springs, and fault zones in mountains a mile beneath the ocean surface, where bizarre landscapes host exotic life forms that rival the most imaginative science fiction. Illustrated throughout with spectacular color photographs, the book starts with a historical summary of seafloor exploration and the developing technologies used to study this extreme environment. It then presents a series of chapters that describe the distinctive geological components of the Earth’s ocean floor and the myriad environments found along mid-ocean ridges where new crust is created. It is here that discoveries of chemosynthetic biological communities revolutionized our ideas about the origins of life and the potential for life’s existence elsewhere in the Universe. The authors provide elegant explanations of how the various geological and hydrothermal features of the seafloor are formed through physical, chemical, and biological processes, and present comparative examples from places where the seafloor is exposed on land. <...>