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were made by people who were either unreliable of character (they
were known to make things up) or who were simply bad-tempered.
They simply could not compete with Forbes's (deserved) influence or
popularity, so it took some more years of further reports of very
deep-sea life to drag the azoic hypothesis down. The collapse of his
grand idea didn't do much to harm Edward Forbes's reputation—he
is still regarded as the father of marine biology—and the Red Lions,
growls and fluttering coat-tails and all, carried his spirit forward after
his untimely death at the age of 39.
The scale and diversity of deep-sea life was only revealed in its true
splendour when the bathyscaphes made their way down into those
depths and began to make systematic observations. In a way, it should
not have come as so much of a surprise. There is a steady food supply,
with all of the organic particles sinking from the productive surface
layers of the ocean. The conditions are stable: it is cold, but never gets
below freezing, and the organisms down there are adapted to life at
just a few degrees above freezing. The waters are at high pressure
(hence the need for bathyscaphes for us surface-dwelling humans),
but the organisms living there have the pressure equalized between
their tissues and the water outside. It is dark—but those organisms
have senses other than sight (and many of them also carry their own
light sources). Crucially, there is oxygen, courtesy of the oceanic
conveyor belt.
In its way, this life-giving system is just as intricate and as remark-
able as the system of arteries, veins, and capillaries that brings oxygen
to every cell within our tissues. The oxygen in the oceans has to reach
water depths of 5 kilometres and more, across distances of thousands
of kilometres. And it has not just to be supplied to living organisms,
but to be present in sufficient amounts to help oxidize the constant
supply of dead organic matter that is drifting down as 'an eternal
snowfall', in Rachel Carson's evocative phrase. Too little oxygen and
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