The full link is www.nature.com/news/exxon-valdez-laid-to-rest-1.11141
I should not that the title in Nature is “Exxon Valdez Laid to Rest as in the link: www.nature.com/news/exxon-valdez-laid-to-rest-1.11141
I google Earthed Alang. You have to see that place. There had to be 100 ships there when the shot was taken.
“On a distant shore washed by a crystal sea there is land with lyrical names where great behemoths run to the beaches to end their days of servitude to unknown masters.
This is where, after a life of plying the waters of the world, their lives end as oily stains on the pristine sands of a paradise they cannot see.
The captains of these forlorn giants who once guided their charges to serve the appetites of millions now wistfully watch their one time servants being devoured by an army of lilliputian workers as they might watch ants cutting a leaf into manageable portions.
The once proud and painted vessels of commerce, now rusted and rotted, are torn as though by wild beasts to become the mundane but less noble objects of a pampered civilization the impoverished ship breakers will never know and during their abbreviated lives cannot even imagine.
I wonder...as these men, and they are men, never forget, ....I wonder if as they as they bargain away their lives for the meager survival of their families do they understand that in the chilly comfort of the concrete pinnacles of near mythical cities, other men, fleshy and swollen with easy abundance, would condemn them to a life of even meaner existence for a sin called living.
The sun sinks on this distant shore yet the attack goes on under the unblinking stare of flood lights til nothing is left of the metallic monster but an oily slick in the once white sand.
Quietly awaiting it's end is another that the rising tide will bring ashore. It too will soon be forgotten as will the workers who lived and often died here.
Only the tides of a crystal sea washing the shores of a far away land will remain.”