a chronologyof undersea exploration（chronologyof海底勘探）（5页）.docVIP

A Chronology of Undersea Exploration 1818Sir John Ross lowers a line more than a mile into the North Atlantic and hauls up worms and a large sea star.1843Edward Forbes proposes that no substantial life can exist below three hundred fathoms.1858The first transatlantic telegraph cable comes to life, its laying preceded by deep seabed surveys. 1859Darwins Origin of Species implies that the deep is a sanctuary for living fossils.1864Norwegians haul up from the deep a sea lily, a living fossil previously found only in rocks 120 million years old.1870Jules Vernes Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea depicts no life in the oceans deepest regions.1872-76British ship Challenger sails the globe while lowering dredges and other gear into the deep, finding long mountain chains, puzzling nodules, and hundreds of animals previously unknown to science. 1892Prince Albert of Monaco starts to probe the seas dark midwaters, discovering new kinds of eels, fish, and squid.1920Alexander Behm sails the North Sea and bounces sound waves off its bottom, advancing a new method of depth measurement known as echo sounding.1925Fritz Haber launches the German Meteor expedition in a bid to extract gold from seawater.1934William Beebe and Otis Barton descend in a tethered sphere to a depth of a half mile, where they glimpse a previously unseen world of living lights and bizarre fish. 1938Fishermen off South Africa pull up an ungainly five-foot fish identified as a coelacanth, a living fossil thought extinct since the days of the dinosaurs 1948Auguste Piccard dives in his bathyscaph, the first untethered craft that carried people into the deep.1950-52Danish ship Galathea lowers dredges into the seas deepest trenches and hauls up swarms of invertebrates.1951British ship Challenger II bounces sound off the bottom, and near Guam finds what appears to be the seas deepest chasm, its lowest point nearly seven miles down, subsequently named the Challenger Deep.