Obituaries can make for fascinating reading. Not just because they celebrate the lives of remarkable people, but also because they often tell stories of moments that change the way we think.
In June 2024 The Economist remembered Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders, the mission’s lunar module pilot. Anders also took perhaps the most famous environmental image ever—Earthrise. Against the drab undulations of the moon, a small blue jewel of an orb rises, brilliant in the darkness. A precious finite refuge of life in a vast cosmos.
Gain some distance and you’ll see how much oceans define the dominant color of Earth. Covering 70% of our planet’s surface, they occupy so much of our world, yet we know so little about what lies under their surface.
In 2006 I’d just been certified for scuba diving and was eager to test my skills. I caught a series of flights, bounding from DC to San Francisco to Singapore to Jakarta to Sulawesi, bouncing along the archipelago of Indonesia before landing in Sorong on the western tip of Papua, where I boarded a wooden schooner. Two days later I put on my tank, flippers, buoyancy control device, and mask, and fell backward over the side and into the ocean in Raja Ampat (translation: Four Kings), one of the healthiest reef systems in the world.
Down I dropped past yellow and blueback fusiliers; schools of angelfish, manta rays, and butterflyfish; past hundreds of coral species, where batfish, surgeonfish, barracuda, wobbegong sharks, and more gathered. At 30 meters, I reached a P-47 Thunderbolt fighter plane that had crashed during World War II. As a kid I grew up fascinated with fighter planes, building them from kits and hanging them from my ceiling amid cotton ball clouds, and this real one was mesmerizing—the propeller, open cockpit, various meters, and fuselage, encrusted with corals and home to marine life. When I looked up and realized how far down I was, I had to remind myself to breathe deep, not to panic, and to ascend as methodically as I’d descended.