7 ms·

Thirty-six Thousand Feet Under the Sea

84 points by hhs 7y ago

wiz21c 7y ago
FTA : >>> Vescovo spent three hours at the bottom, and saw a plastic bag through the viewports. In the Puerto Rico Trench, one of the Limiting Factor’s cameras had captured an image of a soda can. Scientists estimate that in thirty years the oceans will hold a greater mass of plastic than of fish. Almost every biological sample that Jamieson has dredged up from the hadal zone and tested in a lab has been contaminated with microplastics. “Does it harm the ability of these animals to feed, to maneuver, to reproduce?” McCallum said. “We don’t know, because we can’t compare one that’s full of microplastics with one that’s not. Because there aren’t any.” A great achievement, a pitiful conclusion.
- mirimir 7y ago
  There's an analogous horizontal phenomenon. Just as the deep oceans are gravitational sinks, the poles are thermal sinks. Cold traps. And so concentrations of persistent atmospheric pollutants are substantially higher there. So it goes.
  - darkerside 7y ago
    Do solar winds do anything to strip these pollutants away?
    - at_a_remove 7y ago
      I would not think so. Most of these pollutants are "heavy" and solar winds are only appropriate for the less dense molecules, unfortunately.
    - mirimir 7y ago
      Sorry, I neglected to say that they get deposited through precipitation, and incorporated into ecosystems. As I recall, this is mostly about persistent lipophilic organics, some of which are endocrine disruptors. Concentrations are amazingly high in humans (north) and wildlife (north and south). See http://www.educapoles.org/assets/uploads/teaching_dossiers_files/edd_20_en.pdf http://www.educapoles.org/assets/uploads/teaching_dossiers_f...
sq_ 7y ago
Wow. Great story. When I read stuff like this, I never know whether to be utterly amazed with what some ragtag team pulled off or horrified by all of the risks they took.
srge 7y ago
36,000 ft = approx. 11 km
lqet 7y ago
After skimming over the source code, I noticed that the article is transferred to the browser as a JSON containing the article as a string in their own markup language, which is translated to the DOM after the page has loaded. I am seriously wondering: what are the benefits of this? Why did someone decide to do it this way? I don't see any reason why this page couldn't be served fully "rendered" as HTML, it's a pretty straightforward text page with some occasional figures and images lazily loaded. The site's score on Google PageSpeed is horrendous: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Fmagazine%2F2020%2F05%2F18%2Fthirty-six-thousand-feet-under-the-sea https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
- ubermonkey 7y ago
  The New Yorker has done a lot to try, for good or ill, to make the digital experience as similar to the paper one as possible. My guess is the enormous page is part of this effort. I think it's pretty misguided in the browser -- or, at least, that they've pushed well past the point of diminishing returns on it -- but they are to be commended for the consistency and depth of availability. Another factor is probably (again, I'm guessing) that their preferred method of digital consumption is their own apps, where issues are rendered digitally exactly like their paper counterparts, with ads and all. Given the primacy of text at the New Yorker, this actually works out really well. (It's probably worth noting that the New Yorker NEVER does that thing where an article is "continued on page 102" or whatever, which probably makes this work better.) It's definitely cool that this whole-magazine rendering is available (for subscribers) not just for current issues, but for the entire archive going back 95 years. That's neat.
  - gwern 7y ago
    > I think it's pretty misguided in the browser -- or, at least, that they've pushed well past the point of diminishing returns on it -- but they are to be commended for the consistency and depth of availability. They haven't even gotten dropcaps working right; I don't think the issue is having gone too far into diminishing returns, but that their reach exceeds their grasp.
bluenose69 7y ago
Sadly, the New Yorker judges that its readers can handle terms such as "epipelagic" and "hadal", but not the reporting of depths in meters.
- CogitoCogito 7y ago
  > Sadly, the New Yorker judges that its readers can handle terms such as "epipelagic" and "hadal", but not the reporting of depths in meters. Are you complaining that they aren't reporting depths in both feet and meters? Or that they aren't reporting depths in only meters? Also why does it matter? Is the conversion that complicated?
  - sandworm101 7y ago
    Because it is incongruous to toss around "epipelagic" to sound scientific, but then quote every unit of distance in feet/miles. But they also convert their photography to black and white to evoke oldschool print journalism, to evoke the nostalgia so loved by their target demographic. The New Yorker isn't the place for scientific reporting.
    - ubermonkey 7y ago
      I had no idea you were so plugged in to the intentions of the New Yorker editorial staff. In fact, not all photography in the New Yorker is black and white. >The New Yorker isn't the place for scientific reporting. That's a curious and largely indefensible statement not at all supported by facts. What subjects are within their legitimate remit, then?
      - sandworm101 7y ago
        >> What subjects are within their legitimate remit, then? Not science. Their stylistic goals are blatant in the work they produce, this article in particular. The language is very particular, the absence of any reference to the metric system in an allegedly scientific article is notable. And they do convert their photos. Every non-animated photo in this article is BW. Despite all the web trickery, this article still pretends to be a print publication.
damontal 7y ago
This article starts with a cliffhanger. The guy is in his sub at the bottom of the ocean and an electrical failure happens. Then it goes into his history and builds the story from there... but it never revisits the moment of the beginning cliffhanger. How did he get back up? What was the result of the failure? At what point in the overall story did the failure occur?
- rwmj 7y ago
  According to Wikipedia he's still alive, so I guess it wasn't so serious that it stopped him resurfacing. But yes it would have been nice if the article had clarified what happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Vescovo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Vescovo
- akeck 7y ago
  Hmmm... That seems like a possible editorial oversight. I've been fascinated with this article structure for awhile. In almost all the examples I've collected, the conclusion loops back to the original opener to provide inclusio after covering the background, etc. in the middle.
- jve 7y ago
  This was the reason I did read that whole article. To find that info somwhere.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  It said there were spares for all systems. So, evidently the spare didn't fail.
JshWright 7y ago
> During one of the demonstrations, a guest engineer began outlining all the ways he would have done it differently. “O.K.,” McCallum said, smiling. “But you didn’t.” That unnamed engineer would fit right in on many HN threads...
greendave 7y ago
> Lahey saw Vescovo’s mission as a way to develop and test the world’s first unlimited hadal exploration system—one that could then be replicated and improved, for scientists. This really is the crux of the matter. It's easy to dismiss these sorts of projects as just indulging the fantasies of the super-rich, but because of forward-thinking people, as in this case, they can amount to a great deal more.
ncmncm 7y ago
This is outstanding science journalism. Tracy Kidder or Neal Stephenson might do as well, but I don't know who else. Ed Yong?

84 points by hhs 7y ago

FTA : >>> Vescovo spent three hours at the bottom, and saw a plastic bag through the viewports. In the Puerto Rico Trench, one of the Limiting Factor’s cameras had captured an image of a soda can. Scientists estimate that in thirty years the oceans will hold a greater mass of plastic than of fish. Almost every biological sample that Jamieson has dredged up from the hadal zone and tested in a lab has been contaminated with microplastics. “Does it harm the ability of these animals to feed, to maneuver, to reproduce?” McCallum said. “We don’t know, because we can’t compare one that’s full of microplastics with one that’s not. Because there aren’t any.” A great achievement, a pitiful conclusion.

mirimir 7y ago
There's an analogous horizontal phenomenon. Just as the deep oceans are gravitational sinks, the poles are thermal sinks. Cold traps. And so concentrations of persistent atmospheric pollutants are substantially higher there. So it goes.
- darkerside 7y ago
  Do solar winds do anything to strip these pollutants away?
  - at_a_remove 7y ago
    I would not think so. Most of these pollutants are "heavy" and solar winds are only appropriate for the less dense molecules, unfortunately.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    Sorry, I neglected to say that they get deposited through precipitation, and incorporated into ecosystems. As I recall, this is mostly about persistent lipophilic organics, some of which are endocrine disruptors. Concentrations are amazingly high in humans (north) and wildlife (north and south). See http://www.educapoles.org/assets/uploads/teaching_dossiers_files/edd_20_en.pdf http://www.educapoles.org/assets/uploads/teaching_dossiers_f...

sq_ 7y ago

Wow. Great story. When I read stuff like this, I never know whether to be utterly amazed with what some ragtag team pulled off or horrified by all of the risks they took.

srge 7y ago

36,000 ft = approx. 11 km

lqet 7y ago

After skimming over the source code, I noticed that the article is transferred to the browser as a JSON containing the article as a string in their own markup language, which is translated to the DOM after the page has loaded. I am seriously wondering: what are the benefits of this? Why did someone decide to do it this way? I don't see any reason why this page couldn't be served fully "rendered" as HTML, it's a pretty straightforward text page with some occasional figures and images lazily loaded. The site's score on Google PageSpeed is horrendous: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Fmagazine%2F2020%2F05%2F18%2Fthirty-six-thousand-feet-under-the-sea https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

ubermonkey 7y ago
The New Yorker has done a lot to try, for good or ill, to make the digital experience as similar to the paper one as possible. My guess is the enormous page is part of this effort. I think it's pretty misguided in the browser -- or, at least, that they've pushed well past the point of diminishing returns on it -- but they are to be commended for the consistency and depth of availability. Another factor is probably (again, I'm guessing) that their preferred method of digital consumption is their own apps, where issues are rendered digitally exactly like their paper counterparts, with ads and all. Given the primacy of text at the New Yorker, this actually works out really well. (It's probably worth noting that the New Yorker NEVER does that thing where an article is "continued on page 102" or whatever, which probably makes this work better.) It's definitely cool that this whole-magazine rendering is available (for subscribers) not just for current issues, but for the entire archive going back 95 years. That's neat.
- gwern 7y ago
  > I think it's pretty misguided in the browser -- or, at least, that they've pushed well past the point of diminishing returns on it -- but they are to be commended for the consistency and depth of availability. They haven't even gotten dropcaps working right; I don't think the issue is having gone too far into diminishing returns, but that their reach exceeds their grasp.

bluenose69 7y ago

Sadly, the New Yorker judges that its readers can handle terms such as "epipelagic" and "hadal", but not the reporting of depths in meters.

CogitoCogito 7y ago
> Sadly, the New Yorker judges that its readers can handle terms such as "epipelagic" and "hadal", but not the reporting of depths in meters. Are you complaining that they aren't reporting depths in both feet and meters? Or that they aren't reporting depths in only meters? Also why does it matter? Is the conversion that complicated?
- sandworm101 7y ago
  Because it is incongruous to toss around "epipelagic" to sound scientific, but then quote every unit of distance in feet/miles. But they also convert their photography to black and white to evoke oldschool print journalism, to evoke the nostalgia so loved by their target demographic. The New Yorker isn't the place for scientific reporting.
  - ubermonkey 7y ago
    I had no idea you were so plugged in to the intentions of the New Yorker editorial staff. In fact, not all photography in the New Yorker is black and white. >The New Yorker isn't the place for scientific reporting. That's a curious and largely indefensible statement not at all supported by facts. What subjects are within their legitimate remit, then?
    - sandworm101 7y ago
      >> What subjects are within their legitimate remit, then? Not science. Their stylistic goals are blatant in the work they produce, this article in particular. The language is very particular, the absence of any reference to the metric system in an allegedly scientific article is notable. And they do convert their photos. Every non-animated photo in this article is BW. Despite all the web trickery, this article still pretends to be a print publication.

damontal 7y ago

This article starts with a cliffhanger. The guy is in his sub at the bottom of the ocean and an electrical failure happens. Then it goes into his history and builds the story from there... but it never revisits the moment of the beginning cliffhanger. How did he get back up? What was the result of the failure? At what point in the overall story did the failure occur?

rwmj 7y ago
According to Wikipedia he's still alive, so I guess it wasn't so serious that it stopped him resurfacing. But yes it would have been nice if the article had clarified what happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Vescovo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Vescovo
akeck 7y ago
Hmmm... That seems like a possible editorial oversight. I've been fascinated with this article structure for awhile. In almost all the examples I've collected, the conclusion loops back to the original opener to provide inclusio after covering the background, etc. in the middle.
jve 7y ago
This was the reason I did read that whole article. To find that info somwhere.
ncmncm 7y ago
It said there were spares for all systems. So, evidently the spare didn't fail.

JshWright 7y ago

> During one of the demonstrations, a guest engineer began outlining all the ways he would have done it differently. “O.K.,” McCallum said, smiling. “But you didn’t.” That unnamed engineer would fit right in on many HN threads...

greendave 7y ago

> Lahey saw Vescovo’s mission as a way to develop and test the world’s first unlimited hadal exploration system—one that could then be replicated and improved, for scientists. This really is the crux of the matter. It's easy to dismiss these sorts of projects as just indulging the fantasies of the super-rich, but because of forward-thinking people, as in this case, they can amount to a great deal more.

ncmncm 7y ago

This is outstanding science journalism. Tracy Kidder or Neal Stephenson might do as well, but I don't know who else. Ed Yong?