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But in Bertrand’s lifetime scientists’ understanding of Earth’s trajectory had shifted. His father’s and his grandfather’s adventures were in the service of studying the planet’s systems as they were; now the great unknown, in atmospheric and oceanographic science, was how, and with what spiralling consequences, humans were altering them. “Because the atmosphere is so thin, the activity of 7.7 billion humans can actually make significant changes to the entire system,” David Crisp, of nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has said. Piccard had three young daughters; he was acutely aware of how little time had passed between the reliable habitability of the planet that his father had explored and the increasing volatility of the one that his children would inherit.
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