Ocean Stories worth reading — 2020

We’ve collected the articles that made a lasting impact in our brains internally at Bedrock and we’re sharing them in one place for everyone.

Ocean Exploration

Thirty-six Thousand Feet Under the Sea

The explorers who set one of the last meaningful records on earth.
May 10, 2020 — The New Yorker

“When Alan Jamieson, the expedition’s chief scientist, contacted Heather Stewart, a marine geologist with the British Geological Survey, and told her that Vescovo wanted to dive to the deepest point of each ocean, she replied that there was a problem: nobody knew where those points were.

Most maps showing the ocean floor in detail are commissioned by people looking to exploit it. The oil-and-gas and deep-sea-mining industries require extensive knowledge, and they pay for it. But, with a few exceptions, the characteristics of the deepest trenches are largely unknown. As recently as the nineteen-sixties, ocean depths were often estimated by throwing explosives over the side of a ship and measuring the time it took for the boom to echo back from the bottom.

It may appear as if the trenches are mapped — you can see them on Google Earth. But these images weren’t generated by scanning the bottom of the ocean…