INTERVIEW with Gillen D’Arcy Wood — The Wake of HMS Challenger
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GABRIELLE BIRCHAK
Today’s podcast is a very special podcast because I’m going to be interviewing Professor Gillen D’Arcy Wood, the author of The Wake of the HMS Challenger. And by the time you are done listening to this, you’re gonna fall in love with the oceans and you’re going to want to know all about this amazing journey of the HMS Challenger and how their research established the baseline for what we know about the oceans today. The story of the HMS Challenger is amazing and Gillen’s story takes a really unique biocentric view on our 19th century oceans.
Before I begin my interview with Gillen D’Arcy Wood, here is a brief background on the HMS Challenger. The HMS Challenger set sail in December of 1872 and traversed across and back the ocean ending its journey in May of 1876. So we’re celebrating a hundred and fifty years of the HMS Challenger.
And if the name Challenger sounds familiar, that is because NASA named its second orbiter after this Royal Navy vessel. It was a symbolic tribute to a sea vessel that left a legacy of exciting discoveries and enchanting explorations. To seek and discover was the mission of the HMS Challenger.
The goal of the scientists on board was to understand the mysteries of the deep sea. So this book is a beautiful interweaving of stories that lightly focus on the scientists on board but mostly enlighten the readers on the characteristics of the sea creatures that they discovered. Gillen D’Arcy Wood impeccably weaves the stories of the 19th century with our current understanding of the ocean today and implements the importance of ocean conservation.
Gillen D’Arcy Wood is the Schaeffer Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of the award-winning book Tambora, The Eruption That Changed the World, written in 2014, and a history of early Antarctic exploration, Land of Wondrous Cold, written in 2020. His new book, The Wake of the HMS Challenger, How a Legendary Victorian Voyage Tells the Story of Our Ocean’s Decline, marks the 150th anniversary of the famous voyage that gave birth to modern oceanography and calls attention to many threats that our oceans and the ocean life and the habitats face today.
So, let’s have a conversation with Gillen D’Arcy Wood, the author of The Wake of the HMS Challenger. Gillen, it is an absolute honor to have you on Math Science History. I’m really looking forward to this interview.
Let’s jump right into the questions. In the subtitle of your book, you call HMS Challenger’s voyage around the world legendary. I watched a video of you talking about the Challenger where you talk about shifting baseline syndrome or generational amnesia.
And that being said, I’m wondering, has its memory faded a bit after 150 years and why should we return to thinking about it now?
GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
Yes, so here we are 150 years after the birth of oceanography with this voyage of HMS Challenger that traveled the three and a half years across all oceans of the globe. And it’s a time for reflection, retrospection on the importance of that voyage. And my goal in writing the book was to show that it’s not a matter of historical curiosity only, that in fact Challenger has a fresh and urgent story to tell us.
And that is that it gives us this unique snapshot of the oceans as they were 150 years ago. And we can compare what Challenger saw in its three-year voyage to how our oceans are today. And there have been a great many changes that I talk about in the book.
And the reader is able to both relive the voyage as it was and the oceans as they were in the 1870s and also have a cold hard look at our oceans today and how they’ve changed.
GABRIELLE BIRCHAK
And they certainly have changed. What would you say are the great achievements of the Challenger expedition? I’m curious to know because there’s so much material.
How did it launch the ocean sciences as we know them today?
GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
It’s remarkable if you think that this three and a half year expedition around the world was launched with really just a one-page research proposal. And they converted a warship and while the achievements of HMS Challenger are legendary, they brought back in in bottles and crates 5,000 new marine creatures unknown to science. They recorded temperature data at the sea surface and at depth all across the globe.
They measured deep-sea currents. They mapped the seafloor and really paved the way for the modern theories of plate tectonics. And they plunged the Mariana Trench which is the deepest part of the world’s ocean.
So there’s so many different feats of discovery that we owe to HMS Challenger. As a writer it was a daunting prospect to confront their 50 volumes of data that they brought back with them and to find the story that I wanted to tell.
GABRIELLE BIRCHAK
So that being said, as it launched the ocean sciences that we know today, I love that in your book you have main characters and they’re not who you expect. You say that you wanted to take a fresh take on Challenger and you wanted a biocentric narrative. What do you mean by that and why do you think that that biocentric narrative is important today?
GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
So the Challenger story has been told many times over the last 150 years. But the focus has always been on really the human element in the voyage of telling the story of the scientists and their experiences. I wanted to tell that story and retell it but I wanted to shift the focus really to the marine life itself and to make, as you say, to make the marine creatures the stars of the show and have the scientists really just be a kind of vehicle for telling the stories of the amazing creatures that inhabit the deep sea.
So I chose as the focus for every chapter a specific animal or fish that we could focus on and to tell its history, to tell its biography, its deep evolutionary history, but also its prospects for survival in our own modern 21st century oceans in which a marine life faces so many threats. So I do think of this idea of biocentric storytelling as sort of an important challenge for us in the modern era to shift our focus away from our own human experience exclusively and really orient ourselves toward the animals, the plants and animals with whom we share our planet.
GABRIELLE BIRCHAK
That was your primary inspiration for focusing on the characters of the book. Would you say that’s the case?
GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
Oh, absolutely. So I decided to organize the chapters, for instance. I have 13 chapters and I decided that each chapter should feature a particular aspect or creature in the oceans.
And so I have a chapter on coral reefs, I have a chapter that features the seahorse, another that features an absolutely, exquisitely beautiful deep-sea sponge. And my final chapter, which is one of my favorites, is on the green turtle. And in each case, I give an up-close-and-personal narrative about the creature and what the challenger saw, how they saw and described, say, the seahorse or the sponge, and then the challenges that the animal faces today living in our anthropogenic oceans.
GABRIELLE BIRCHAK
I thought that was just brilliant because I loved that you focused on the creatures of the sea because they’re so very valuable. That was also inspiring for the reader. I wanted to know how the research on the HMS Challenger is different than other research boats that helped establish the baseline data for all future ocean research because their journeys were extensive.
How did it establish that baseline?
GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
So really nothing compares in scale and scope to the voyage of the HMS Challenger, which is why we go back to it again and again. The fact that they converted a Royal Navy warship and turned it into a floating marine science academy, they appointed six scientists, there’s a crew of 250 men, they sailed for three and a half years, no expense was spared, they had the latest cutting-edge technology available to them, and of course what they had was the, most importantly, was the infrastructure of the British Empire. They were able to sail from port to port, they were able to go from Portugal to Madeira to Brazil to South Africa to Antarctica to Melbourne in Australia to the Philippines and across the Pacific, and at every point in the journey they were able to make use of the resources of the colonial ports that were run by the British.
So in a way it was a one-off endeavour that has never again been repeated, and in fact there was not a research journey of comparable proportions to the Challenger until well into the 20th century. So if you think about that, the data that we have from the Challenger in the 1870s is this unique snapshot of the oceans, and we don’t have anything as detailed or textured until well into the 20th century, and it’s actually true that some places that the Challenger visited were so remote that they have never been visited by a research expedition, and so that there are some creatures that they found in parts of the ocean that have, where the Challenger specimen remains the sole data point for that creature. For several starfish, for example, the one known example of the species is from the Challenger voyage, which is remarkable when you think about it.
GABRIELLE BIRCHAK
It’s very remarkable considering that was, this is the anniversary, the 150th anniversary of the HMS Challenger. That data is 150 years old. It is a foundational baseline.
GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
Exactly, and unique, yes.
GABRIELLE BIRCHAK
I understand that they left a very vast archive behind the exploration, and isn’t it 50 volumes of data and research, personal diaries and logs of the scientists and the ship’s officers? How many years did it take you to write this phenomenal book?
GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
It took me about five years, and you’re right that these 50 volumes of data was a special edition, limited edition, only there are some lucky universities and museums around the world that have the full set of 50 volumes, each of them the size of the Gutenberg Bible. I realized very early on that it was not possible to provide an absolutely comprehensive treatment of the voyage and all its discoveries. What I decided to do for the reader was I wanted the readers to experience the whole journey, every ocean and continent that they traveled across.
I wanted to give a highlight reel of their discoveries, and I also wanted to immerse the reader in the daily life aboard a Victorian warship that would be converted to a research vessel to give the reader the sights, the sounds, and the smells of what it was like every day to send down the trawl and to bring up a kind of cornucopia of marine life, and to try to recapture for us 150 years later the experience of wonder that the Challenger scientists had on a daily basis by encountering creatures that they’d humanized, you know, they’d never seen before. A lot of it, of course, was a puzzle to them or a mystery or an enigma, and trying to capture that incredible era of curiosity in nature at the beginnings of what we now know today as modern marine science.
GABRIELLE BIRCHAK
What were the hardest decisions you had to make as a writer as you compiled this into 13 chapters?
GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
Obviously, a lot was left out. There’s a lot left on the cutting room floor, and in choosing the creatures to focus on, I created a kind of Venn diagram in my head where I needed the creature I chose to be charismatic in some way, an interesting creature, one for which there’s a paper trail. There’s a scientific literature on the creature that I could talk about, be it some particular species of coral, or a specific microplankton, or again, you know, the green turtle.
The third factor was a kind of threat or endangerment that the animal was under. Thinking about these three things, that they’re charismatic, that there’s scientific research done on them, but they’re also under threat today. It was by creating a smaller class of creatures that I could talk about that would focus in really on animals in the oceans that best represent the current ocean crisis and the challenges that we face in trying to viable habitats for all the animals in the ocean.
GABRIELLE BIRCHAK
You certainly accomplish that. You’ve definitely immersed the reader in the entire environment, and the smells, and even the characteristics of each of the sea animals that you’re talking about. In one chapter, you talk about the brooch clams and the hairy mussels, and you had noted that Francois Perron discovered a trigonia-like shell, which showed that the trigonia shell was not extinct.
And I know back in the Victorian era, back in the 1800s, there had been discussions and debate about extinction, but as I understand it, it was the 19th century mindset that our oceans were inexhaustible. Did the discoveries on the HMS help to create that bridge to our current understanding of ocean conservation?
GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
It’s certainly true that they didn’t have our modern view of endangered habitats, and that the human impact on ecosystems could be so intense as we know today. So they were in a way gifted with a kind of obliviousness with regard to the human footprint on the ocean. And you mentioned extinction.
Well, extinction in the 19th century, or the theory of extinction, the idea that animals could pass into and out of existence, this idea was still controversial in the 19th century. There were certainly arguments or proponents of the idea that extinction was, a benevolent god would not allow creatures once created to lapse into extinction. So this was still a controversial issue.
And you mentioned the famed trigonia shell, which had been discovered in fossil form and was held up as an example of the continuity of creation, the continuity of life, the fact that a living trigonia shell could be found. But also, and this is where the trigonia is so interesting, it also served potentially as a proof of Darwinian evolution in that differences could be shown between the ancient fossilized trigonia and the modern living trigonia. And when we look back to Challenger, we can see how Challenger sailed really under the shadow of Darwin, if you like.
And one of the principal reasons for Challenger setting out was for the purpose of discovering potential missing links in the deep sea. The Victorians, unlike us, the Victorians looked at the deep sea as a kind of museum of ancient life. They presumed that the deep sea was unchanging, and it would be a kind of museum of monsters from the past.
Now, one of the interesting outcomes of the expedition was that it didn’t really discover a kind of museum trove of ancient forms of life in the deep sea. And we now know that that’s because the deep sea is not ancient and unchanging in the way that they thought it was. But with all the sort of controversy and the Darwinian atmosphere surrounding the voyage, and the fact that they set out in that Darwinian moment, I think from our point of view, 150 years later, the voyage turned into something different entirely.
When we look back at it, we see it as the first ever inventory of the oceans. It’s an extraordinary catalogue of tens of thousands of creatures, which they were able to geographically locate and identify and describe in their natural habitats. And as such, it’s this incredible information base for us to see what our oceans looked like on the eve of industrialization and before all the accumulation of our modern impacts on the oceans.
GABRIELLE BIRCHAK
Stick around. After the break, we’re going to learn about Darwin’s inspiration for the HMS Challenger and how even Victorians were sensitive to the idea of how ocean conditions could affect life in the oceans. Would you say that Darwin’s discoveries were an inspiration for the HMS Challenger?
GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
I believe so. So if we look at the dates, the Origin of Species was published in 1859 and controversy raged through the 1860s about Darwin’s theories. Darwin himself pointed to the deep sea as the place in which his theories might be verified or not, where missing links might be found.
The debate really centered on whether it could be shown that creatures changed over time and could we find examples of evolution in action. The Challenger definitely set out with the six scientists aboard were very excited at the possibility that they might make scientific history by bringing up examples of missing links from the deep sea and begin a new chapter in evolutionary science. From that point of view, the results of the expedition were equivocal, it must be said, because they had why they brought with them a misconception about the deep sea.
We now know that with modern tectonic plate theory, we know that the seafloor, the oldest portions of the seafloor are only millions of years old, certainly not tens of millions or let alone billions of years old, which is how they imagined to be. So we know that there is geological turnover in the deep sea and therefore biological turnover as well, but they had none of that information. It’s quite remarkable when reading the summaries of their reports, how clear a picture they did have of the oceans and how many of their ideas are still holed up today.
They believed that, as we do, that environment is very important to the habitats of creatures and to their prospects for survival and also to their evolution. So they were particularly sensitive to the idea of how ocean conditions might affect life in the oceans. That basic idea was one that the Victorians had and were particularly attentive to, which is why, along with all of the information about marine life, they also took great care to bring back reams of temperature data and data regarding ocean chemistry, which is so valuable to us today.
If you can imagine, we now in a period of rising ocean temperatures, we can look back to the 1870s thanks to the Challenger and see a kind of baseline of ocean temperature conditions and measure the amount of change that has happened over 150 years. So in that sense, the Challengers were very sensitive to the idea of environmental conditions driving life on earth and life in the oceans. They were certainly very modern in their thinking.
GABRIELLE BIRCHAK
Your book is a scientific discovery story full of natural wonders of the sea. It also has a very powerful conservation message about how much our oceans have changed since the days of the HMS Challenger. What are some of the major threats to our oceans that you highlight in the book?
GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
Yes, our oceans are certainly in crisis and suffering under multiple strains and stresses. I think the three main issues confronting the oceans today are overfishing, ocean warming, and also plastic pollution. I take them, each of the three of these, one at a time and in a chapter that I write about the Challengers’ visit to Japan and their encounter with the infant Japanese salmon fishing industry, I talk about how our seafood consumption over the 20th century has increased eight or tenfold, particularly since the Second World War.
90% of larger fish in the higher levels of the food chain, thinking salmon and tuna and cod, have been depleted from the oceans. Even since the 1980s, we’ve lost 40% of fish and even 20% of invertebrates, such as scallops. With that overfishing is the impacts of deep-sea trawling technology on the seabed.
We have richer ecosystems of corals and sponges, etc., trawled over again and again by these large nets the size of football fields and turned into sandy deserts. I’d say that if there were a number one problem, it were probably that. But of course, there’s a lot of press that we read now about the effects of warming on the oceans.
And right now, I’m talking to you from the Midwest, where we’re experiencing a drought. And those drought conditions can be connected all the way to what scientists are calling a marine blob, a great heat blob in the Pacific Ocean, where thousands of square miles of ocean are up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average. And this is affecting our weather systems.
And if the marine blob, if marine heat waves are powerful enough to impact weather in the Midwest, think what it must be like for the creatures who are living in the oceans themselves. An increased warmth wreaks havoc with the metabolism of the fish, who have to expend much more energy cooling themselves, maintaining their body temperature. It affects their reproduction cycles.
It damages or compromises their food sources, plankton and kelp, etc. And the larger demographic and geographic issue is that warmer waters drives these fish populations in the direction of the poles. They’re seeking cooler waters, seeking their natural habitat.
And of course, because our planet is a sphere, they will eventually run out of room as they attempt to migrate for their survival to the poles. The last thing that I would mention, the last of sort of, I guess, the three horsemen of the ocean apocalypse would be microplastics. And we’ve all heard about the Pacific Garbage Patch and the Atlantic Garbage Patch, these massive gyres of plastic circulating in the middle of the oceans, the size of Texas.
These capture the headlines. Worse still, even than the impact of those is microplastics, the way these deposited plastics in the ocean break down over time to form micro or even nano-sized plastics. Now these enter into the marine food chain.
They distribute themselves through ocean sediments and in the water column. They’re mistaken for food, they’re ingested. And we now know from sampling a wide variety of ocean creatures from turtles and sharks all the way down to the smallest of fish and crustaceans that there are polymers and plastics in the stomachs of almost all living creatures in the sea now.
And we’re only just beginning to sort of grasp what the implications of the plastic infestation of the sea will be on marine life, but also for us, for humans as apex consumers at the top of the ocean food chain.
GABRIELLE BIRCHAK
So you’re saying that we are just only at the beginning of understanding the damages that microplastics are doing to our ocean?
GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
Yes, it’s really new science in the last 10 years or so. There was a very important paper published that attempted to calculate the amount of plastics since the 1950s had been deposited in the ocean and what we were able to observe on the coasts and in the sea surface and the great plastic garbage patches and realised there was an enormous shortfall. The plastic that could be accounted for, say in the garbage patches in the ocean gyres and on the coasts and on the beaches, barely accounted for half of all ocean plastic that must have entered the sea.
That’s as much as five trillion pieces of plastic since 1950. So this prompted a search for where it might be and what might have happened to all the plastic. And it was discovered in the sea floor and in the water column in the form of microplastics.
So now, yeah, this new frontier of science in trying to understand, well, what are microplastics doing to the oceans?
GABRIELLE BIRCHAK
Didn’t they find a plastic bag at the bottom of the Mariana Trench?
GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
That is absolutely true. I write about that in the book. And the deepest part of the Mariana Trench, the deepest trench in the ocean, five miles deep, discovered really quite freakishly by HMS Challenger in 1874.
And submersibles have been down to the Challenger Deep, including James Cameron in his own piloted submersible. And they have found there, even in this deepest portion of the sea, deeper below the sea than the Mount Everest rises above the earth, they’ve found beer cans and plastic bags, cables and toiletries, packaging, everything that you could imagine.
GABRIELLE BIRCHAK
Wow, that’s heartbreaking. That’s why I really appreciate your book, because it really tells us the importance of the value of sea life and the beauty of it, as well as the value in conserving it all.
GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
Yeah. And I think that this is such an important historical moment for us to turn our attention toward the oceans. I mean, we are terrestrial beings, if you think of it.
And of course, our biases are toward the land that we inhabit, and we’ve increasingly dominated over time. And the oceans can be relegated to a kind of afterthought for us. I wanted my book to participate in what I think is a growing movement, a turn toward the oceans.
There are shelves full nowadays of books about the oceans and ocean life. And I think we are at a moment where we are turning our attention to 70% of our planet. We are a watery, aqueous, blue planet.
We need to remind ourselves of that.
GABRIELLE BIRCHAK
Five years writing this book, what was your favorite part of the story?
GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
My favorite part of the book, I think, was the end, my final chapter, which is about the green turtles. And in a way, the history of the green turtles over the last 500 years is sort of the history of human impacts on the planet really summed up the fact that in the early days of colonialism in the Americas, green turtle meat was an important protein to the plantation economies of the West Indies, because it was cheap, plentiful protein source. But the numbers, the sheer numbers of green turtles harvested and consumed reduced their original population from probably 60 or 70 million down to only several hundred thousand.
So it’s a near extinction threat facing the green turtles up and into the 20th century. But since the middle of the 20th century, when the prospects for extinction of the green turtles became apparent, there have been a very successful series of regulations and conservation efforts focused on the green turtles that have seen them rebound from their near extinction numbers. And they’re now beginning to flourish again in both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans.
And the final chapter of my book takes the reader to their favorite breeding ground in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on a tiny volcanic island called Ascension Island and shows how the banning of turtle harvesting and the protection of the beaches where the green turtle females come to lay their eggs and bury them to reproduce. The protection of these beaches has enabled these creatures to, these wonderful reptiles, to bounce back. The story of the green turtle shows us that there is a baseline resilience in ocean life and that all these creatures need is a chance, is a kind of fighting chance to bounce back.
And it’s an opportunity for us, you know, as the human community to cooperate and to create new bonds with these animals we so admire and have so relied on in the past and to help them flourish with us, you know, in the world rather than seeing our relationship to the world as sort of purely exploitative and consuming without thought. The idea that we can sustainably live with these animals and move into a better future together.
GABRIELLE BIRCHAK
It’s a beautiful chapter. It’s so touching and you’re right, giving them a fighting chance and then creating new bonds also creates a level of hope that we can do this with the rest of the planet as well.
GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
I think that’s true that I wanted my book to be the full spectrum from the dark to the light. That yes, there has been tragedies in our oceans but it’s not too late. There’s still places of extraordinary enchantment and wonder.
There are creatures fighting for their survival. It’s an extraordinary real-world aquarium of wonderful life. The challenge now is for us to learn and relearn how to value these animals and their habitats and with the science and the technology that we have today to apply that in preserving those habitats and ensuring that these creatures have the space that they deserve to thrive.
GABRIELLE BIRCHAK
If people want to read your book, where can they find it?
GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
In any favorite online purveyor, it’s certainly available on Amazon and online, anywhere you would like to purchase it. It should be available in bookstores from the October the 21st. If you are living in the United Kingdom or in Europe, you’ll have to wait until January.
GABRIELLE BIRCHAK
For my listeners right now in the United States, you can go out today, October 21st and purchase the book. I highly recommend it. It’s really good.
GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
Thanks, Gabrielle. It was a great pleasure. It was an extraordinary journey for me as a writer to weave the tale and to try to bring the 19th century world alive and to show its urgent relevance to us today.
Really, the time between our era and theirs is really just the blink of an eye in biological terms, in evolutionary terms, in the terms of the life on earth. We need to be reminded of that. We’re so harried and harassed by the present.
We tend to compress our idea of time into just what’s immediately important to us. I think this is an opportunity reading this book to think that, well, back the 19th century is still, in a way, present to us and alive and important.
GABRIELLE BIRCHAK
Before we go, what are your last thoughts?
GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
I think my last thoughts are that by revisiting the 1870s and revisiting this extraordinary one-off voyage, reliving that narrative with them is a chance for ourselves as vicarious travelers to experience an enchantment of nature and the enchantment of the oceans, to relive with them the wonder and the amazement of their discoveries. I think that here in the natural world and on a day-to-day basis, we’re confronted with data and information about environmental crises that we need to also look, explore beyond the data and to rethink at an existential and emotional level what our relationship with the natural world is, was, and can be. As I say in my introduction to the book, in order to save the world, we need to re-enchant the world.
We need to rediscover a more primal, sympathetic connection with the world around us, with its creatures, and that on land and on the oceans. I think the purpose of my book is to create that kind of world, to immerse the reader in a world where a living, thriving ocean and human participation in that world is possible and available to us.
GABRIELLE BIRCHAK
I love that idea, that to truly save the world, we have to fall in love with it again and to be re-enchanted with it. That is really profound. Gillen, thank you for reminding us of that and for spending time with me and my listeners here at Math Science History.
GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
It’s been a great pleasure, Gabrielle. Thank you.
GABRIELLE BIRCHAK
The HMS Challenger sailed for three and a half years to gather the ocean’s first global baseline. That record lets us compare the 1870s to now, and the changes are undeniable. Depleted big fish, marine heat waves, and microplastics from the surface to the seafloor.
But this isn’t a eulogy. As Gilbert D’Arcy Wood says, progress starts when we re-enchant the world, when sea life becomes central to our story again. The green turtle’s recovery shows what happens when protection meets patience.
Baselines tell us what we’ve lost. Imagination tells us what we can restore. Challenger was a beginning, not an ending.
Gillen’s book is available in the United States today, October 21st, 2025, and in the UK and Europe in January 2026. The links to Gillen’s book are in the show notes, in the description, and you can also find them at MathScienceHistory.com under the link Transcriptorium, where we will put the transcripts to this podcast. Thank you for listening to Math Science History, and until next time, carpe diem.
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