The search had been going on for four days. Crammed into the cockpit of the submersible Alvin—the research vessel used to survey the Titanic—geochemist Harmon Craig and a group of colleagues from Scripps Institution of Oceanography were scouring the Pacific Ocean floor off the island of Hawaii, looking for the crater of Loihi, an undersea hot spot thought to be the volcanic precursor of the next Hawaiian island. At a depth of 1,000 meters, with the darkness relieved only by the A

Picture this You’re in an isolated corner of Easter Island, leading a research expedition peopled by lay volunteers who have actually paid for the privilege of helping you find and catalogue a series of ancient rock paintings. You’ve hiked for hours over extremely rough terrain to get to your site, a cliffside so precipitous that the volunteers have to be anchored to solid ground with ropes. Out of the blue, a female vol unteer approaches you and asks if there’s anyplace nearby

As federal money flows toward ‘glamour facilities,’ enterprising scientists are raising private funds for smaller scopes For 30 years the big white dome in the Southern California hills was the most important observatory in the world, the home of what one astronomer calls “the grandfather of all modern reflecting telescopes.” But in 1984 light pollution from nearby Los Angeles caught up with Mt. Wilson Observatory and its famous 100-inch Hooker telescope, causing its