our survival depends on the ocean. The more we’ve delved downward, the more we’ve had to revise our ideas about how the earth operates, how the climate behaves, what we can learn from the distant past, our place in the overall scheme of life—even our definition of life. Now it’s apparent that nature runs as a massively interconnected system, with the deep sea as its motherboard. Yet even as we tinker with the machinery in potentially irreversible ways, we have only the foggiest notion of how it all works. The deep buffers our excess carbon (at least so far), drives the ocean’s circulation (and
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