… Who would have thought my shrivell’d heart
Could have recovered greennesse? It was gone
Quite underground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown;
Where they together
All the hard weather
Dead to the world, keep house unknown …

From ‘The Flower’ by George Herbert

The topography of the seabed consists of a circular
plateau of porous rock, two hundred kilometres in
radius, making the ocean here as shallow as a coastal
reef … it is not hard to imagine an artificial land-mass
geophysically welded to this plateau, sustaining a
society with its own infrastructure and economy. The
technology is available. But is the vision?

From an article by Gilles de Ferrer in The Oceanographer

                  Translated by Colin Harbutt