A three-month mission, beginning in 2004, turned into six years of exploration.
During six fruitless years of exploration, D'Arcy and his Anglo-Persian Oil Company (A.P.O.C).
Attenborough begins by confessing that "in all my years of exploration, these are the creatures I find most curious".
The North Sea has yielded around 45 billion barrels of oil in 40 years of exploration - but productivity there is declining, as shown by the chart below.
After 70 years of exploration, major natural gas and crude oil finds were made in the late 1980s; oil and gas production began near Lake Kutubu and Tari in 1992.
It would be a scandal if, after 30 years of exploration and 135 missions, the legacy of the shuttle were boiled down to the tragedies of Columbia and Challenger.
Last Thursday, at about the crack of dawn, the space shuttle Atlantis touched down at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, marking the end of the NASA Space Shuttle Program after thirty years of exploration.
In NASA/ART: 50 Years of Exploration (Abrams, $40), James Dean and Bertram Ulrich collect a group of space-themed pictures in oils, watercolors, graphite, colored pencil and — strangely, perhaps — no airbrushing.
President Felipe Calderón of Mexico announced Wednesday that the national oil company, Pemex, had struck oil in deep water, its first success after years of exploration in the deeper reaches along the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.
