 197  The land surface of the globe is well known today, but we do not know much about the bed of the sea, particularly the floor of the deep ocean. In the past years four large oceanographic expeditions from various countries studied ocean depths. Three of them - the Swedish, the Danish and the British expeditions - were "round-the-world" expeditions. The Soviet expedition on the Vityaz (1) worked on a smaller area in the North-West Pacific. Sent by an Institute of the Academy of Sciences (2), the motorship Vityaz is equipped for exploration of the sea at any depth. It has all the necessary instruments - hydrological, hydrochemical and geological. Sixty scientists can live and work on the Vityaz. It has 14 fully equipped laboratories. The Vityaz studied a particularly deep area of the Pacific - the Tuscarora Deep (3) running from the Bering islands to the Isle of Hokkaido. The materials collected by the expedition are of great scientific interest (4). The Tuscarora Deep going down over six miles (5), is one of the nineteen deepest spots found in the depths of the sea. Fifteen of them are in the Pacific, most of them in the western parts of the ocean. In 1864, an American ship, the Tuscarora, found a depth of nearly 28,000 feet in this area. This depth, well over (6) five miles, was at that time the greatest depth in that part of the ocean. The greatest depth found by the Vityaz in 1953, however, was over 34,000 feet, some 6.5 miles. This is over a mile deeper than the depth found by the Tuscarora. It makes it one of the deepest places in the Pacific Ocean. By using echoes coming back the sea floor, the scientists on the Vityaz mapped (7) its shape in great detail. Earthuakes, and volcanic activity generally, was found over (8) a wide area, particularly in the northern part, where part of the sea bed dropped down hundreds of feet. Undersea volcanoes were found by the expedition. Deep water fishes were caught, may of them not only of the new species, but even of new types, unknown to science. • Some of them have no eyes and they move about (9) with the aid of tentac les. Others have large eyes like telescope lenses, or eyes on the end of Ion; stalks. Примечания (1) on the Vityaz - на судне "Витязь". Названия кораблей имеют ар, тикль the и, как правило, выделяются в тексте курсивом без кавычек. 197 |
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