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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (206894)	10/25/2006 12:01:17 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

"it is possible that the human race will defeat this planet. " Not a chance. You're being way too pessimistic, or you think too highly of our ablities. Not even if we bury all our bombs and blow them up all at the same time. Not even if we blow them all up above ground and send the planet into nuclear winter. When the smoke and dust clears, the Universe will find the same old mudball, with the same amount of land and water and air, minus what gets blasted out strong enuf to overcome gravity, and Life in the deep Hot oases in chill darkness Before the first dives to mid-ocean ridges in the late 1970s, researchers expected to encounter a barren, mostly lifeless landscape. Algae and plants cannot survive without sunlight, which does not penetrate ocean water below about 1000 meters. Without plants or algae to form the base of the food chain, how could there be much to eat apart from a sparse sprinkling of "marine snow"—the corpses of animals and plants which died nearer the surface? But patches around active volcanoes and vents teem with life. Living without sunlight Some animals found around vents get their food by eating other organisms. But many of the animals living near deep-sea vents obtain their food in a very different way: they play host to particular species of microbe that live inside their bodies and manufacture food by combining certain chemicals found in vent fluids with oxygen found in seawater. The microbes give some of the food they manufacture to their animal hosts. venturedeepocean.org news @ nature.com - Bone-devouring worms discovered - Deep-sea ...Two worm species discovered in the dark recesses of the deep sea could rival the macabre beasts of your childhood nightmares. Scientists have named a new ... www.nature.com/news/2004/040726/full/040726-10.html Creatures of the Thermal Vents by Dawn Stover The three-person submersible Alvin sank through the cold, dark waters of the Pacific Ocean for more than an hour, finally touching down on the sea floor more than 8,000 feet below the surface. It was December 1993, and the scientists inside the sub had come to this stretch of the East Pacific Rise, an underwater mountain range about 500 miles southwest of Acapulco, Mexico, to inspect a recently formed hydrothermal vent - a fissure in the ocean bottom that leaks scalding, acidic water. Peering out through the sub's tiny windows, the visitors were astonished to see thickets of giant tube worms, some four feet tall. The tail ends of the worms were firmly planted on the ocean floor, while red plumes on the other ends swayed like a field of poppies. Alvin had brought researchers to the same spot less than two years earlier, when they had seen none of these strange creatures. Measurements at the site have since shown that individual tube worms can increase in length at a rate of more than 33 inches per year, making them the fastest-growing marine invertebrates. That means tube worms can colonize a vent more rapidly than scientists once thought. seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov Now don't you feel better? May I offer you a refreshing lemonade? Don't worry, be happy.