Beebe's Sea World's Surface

 "Those who knew Beebe knew that he wanted nothing elaborate or overly mechanical."

 How's everyone doing? Here's polyamorous ornithologist and sub-aquatic garden enthusiast Charles William Beebe* in his "bathysphere", seconds before being joined in his four-foot sphere by its equally lanky designer Otis Barton, to embark together upon an unprecedented two-mile dive off the coast of Nonsuch Island, Bermuda, and report back to fellow bathynaut Gloria Hollister and illustrator Else Bostelmann, humanity's first ever sightings of in situ underwater bioluminescence:

 Two of Bostelmann's illustrations (source here).

 Bathynauts were basically astronauts, but steampunk, and with open marriages and actual aliens. Here's silent footage of one of their later expeditions (with a bunch of annoying pop-ups over the fish images):

 And here's an excellent image of an angler fish Beebe spotted off Port-au-Prince in 1927, I guess as a result of dredging because he was only doing helmet dives back then (source here):

 And most importantly here is how I first heard of all this, the second episode of Royal Museum Greenwich's utterly fascinating live stream. To quote guest Jon Copley: "more than half the world is covered by water that's more than two miles deep... it's the reality of most of the surface of our planet." So the Earth is Ocean. And here's a more recent find from the hot springs in the deep Antarctic, BILLIONS OF CRABS:

 In addition to the above sources, here's Beebe's wikipedia entry containing a wonderfully comprehensive and quite personal biography of the man (*Robbie Hudson, if you're reading this, I assume you know about this guy, I mean he seems entirely up your street) and here's a contemporary newspaper splurge. And here's today's Defoe:

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