INTO THE ABYSS

摘要

The world of the deep sea is a cold, dark, highly pressurised and largely-unexplored frontier populated by strange, unearthly creatures. YOU'D HAVE THOUGHT DR RON THRESHER was describing a mission to a distant planet. "Everybody was crowded into the control room to see what it would look like. We had no idea what we'd find," the CSIRO marine and atmospheric research scientist recalls. "Imagine a light shining out. It's all dark, apart from the occasional sparkle. Then we saw a fine-silt bottom and acouple of weird-looking black things crawling along; then a huge, transparent, tulip-shaped creature about a metre high. It was a very strange world. You got the impression you were in a place [far from] home."