DISCOVERING A NEW WORLD
This article is an adaptation of our weekly Photography newsletter that was originally sent out on May 1, 2021. Want this in your inbox? Subscribe here.
By Whitney Johnson, Director of Visual and Immersive Experiences
Every day for four weeks, the diving bell (above) carried four divers hundreds of feet down to the floor of the Mediterranean.
The depths below 150 feet presented a new world to photographer Laurent Ballesta and his team. Without a diving bell, and continual pressurized conditions, most humans get only a glimpse of life that deep.
“When you’re scuba diving, it takes four to six hours just to ascend from such depths; you have to decompress slowly to avoid dying from the bends. So time on the bottom is frustratingly short, usually only five or 10 minutes,” he wrote in this month’s issue of National Geographic.
These images below show how Ballesta and his team captured this new world.
On the barge: Ballesta (foreground) and his colleagues shared 55 square feet of confinement. The hatch led to the diving bell—and to freedom in the deep.
10 feet down: Support crew member Cedric Gentil floats upside down on the flat bottom of the barge, next to the diving bell shaft. By keeping the pressure inside the habitat and the bell the same as the seafloor, the team avoided the need for time-consuming decompressions between dives.
Farther down: Narwhal shrimps float in forests of black coral more than 250 feet below the surface. (The coral is named for its black skeleton, but the living tissue is white.) The shrimps are about four inches long and send signals by touching antennae. In the Mediterranean bits of plastic have been found in their guts.
A delicate dance: On the very first dive, off Marseille, Ballesta witnessed a rare sight: Two veined squid engaged in a delicate mating dance, their tentacles entwining. The male is on the bottom.
Look very closely: What is that huge, camouflaged thing with what looks like two sticks coming out of its nose? That’s a monkfish, which can grow up to 4 1/2 feet long. Those “sticks” really are part of a long protruding lure it brandishes to attract prey.
312 feet down: “Modesty forces the familiar coastal moray to migrate towards the dimly lit depths to mate,” Ballesta writes. After this pair of eels gaped at each other a bit, they entwined their slithery bodies and cast sperm and eggs into the water.
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THE BIG TAKEAWAY
When the glaciers melt: It was tradition in the Peruvian Andes. At night, pilgrims would use the reflection from the moon that cascaded atop snow-capped peaks as a guide to make their way up the sacred Colque Punku glacier. These days, however, the “snow star” has no snow to reflect, Amanda Magnani and Nat Geo Explorer Armando Vega report for Nat Geo. But the four-day religious festival goes on. Above, dancers carry a cross at dawn as part of the festivities. Below, pilgrims sit during the observances. Longtime participant Richart Aybar Quispe Soto says believers asked what happened to the snow. “'Sin, it was sin,' they would say, and it wasn’t sin, it was global warming.”
This story was supported by a National Geographic Society storytelling grant.
IN A FEW WORDS
People at birth are inherently good.
Chloé Zhao, Oscar-winning director of ‘Nomadland’, From: ‘How I keep going when things get hard’
INSTAGRAM OF THE DAY
Saddled up: During weekdays Shaquilla “Shaq” Blake is the lead audio/visual technician at the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston. On off hours, she’s pursuing her love of horses—and challenging the (rich, white) stereotypes of the equestrian community. Black riders make up less than 1 percent of the U.S. Equestrian Foundation, and a Black equestrian has never competed for the U.S. in the Olympics. “I’ve learned to come off as nonthreatening as possible,” Blake tells Elle magazine, “whitewashing myself in a way, so that people are comfortable around me.” Celeste Sloman took this profile of Blake with her Thoroughbred at her home stable in Massachusetts.
Send in the cavalry: In Morocco, ‘Fantasia’ presents a horse-led charge
DID A FRIEND FORWARD THIS TO YOU?
On Monday, Debra Adams Simmons covers the latest in history. If you don't get the daily newsletter, sign up here for Robert Kunzig on the environment, Victoria Jaggard on science, George Stone on travel, Rachael Bale on animal and wildlife news, and Whitney Johnson on photography.
THE LAST GLIMPSE
Waiting for hot springs action: This photograph from Yellowstone National Park accompanied a December 1965 article written by Lynda Bird Johnson, the eldest of two daughters of then-President Lyndon Baines Johnson. The first daughter, in an article titled “I See America,” wrote about her journey in an Airstream throughout the western United States. Sara Manco, senior photo archivist for the National Geographic Society, is fond of this image by Dean Conger, a longtime staff photographer. “I think what I love most about this photo is that not much has changed other than the outfits worn by the tourists, and the crowd may be a bit bigger now,” Manco told us.
This newsletter has been curated and edited by David Beard and Monica Williams, and Jen Tse selected the photographs. Amanda Williams-Bryant, Rita Spinks, Alec Egamov, and Jeremy Brandt-Vorel also contributed this week. Have an idea, a link, a Yellowstone story? We’d love to hear from you at david.beard@natgeo.com. Thanks for reading!
