A West African Coral Reef Sat Buried in a Report for 60 Years (e360.yale.edu)
Gérard Zinzindohoué spent years getting rejected for grants before National Geographic gave him $20,000 — most of it swallowed by sonar gear towed behind a jury-rigged fishing boat. What his team confirmed 175 feet down, 14 miles off Benin's coast, was eight species of coral and a shark habitat nobody had mapped since that single 1960s paragraph.
One HN reader had a blunter theory for why this reef made it while so many didn't: it sits along a coastline where almost nobody wears chemical sunscreen, which is documented to kill coral elsewhere.
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