Author: Natalie Dillon

Deep-ocean footage has a certain kind of silence. There is no wind. No background noise. Just a remote-controlled vehicle slicing through pitch-black water, its lights grazing the edges of rock formations that haven’t seen anything in millions of years, not even light. That’s about what scientists saw during NOAA’s most recent deep-sea survey operations off the coast of Hawaii, and what the cameras captured has forced geologists into unsettling but fascinating territory. The results were not presented in a single, dramatic moment. Through NOAA’s ongoing Beyond the Blue campaign and its Ocean Exploration Cooperative Institute missions, which have been methodically…

A new hydrographic survey project to map and characterize over 30,000 square nautical miles of seafloor off U.S. waters was announced by NOAA in January 2026. A few hundred words made up the press release. It made very little sound as it landed. No public discussion, no cable news segment, and no congressional hearing. The silence was startling for an initiative linked to what might be one of the most important resource decisions of the upcoming ten years, and it’s difficult not to believe that it was at least partially deliberate. Only 54% of the United States’ own waters have…

There are rocks sitting in the dark somewhere on the Pacific Ocean floor, about five kilometers below the surface—deeper than most people can even imagine. They appear unremarkable. Brown and lumpy, about the size of a potato. Some of them are so much older than the human species that it is nearly meaningless. In complete silence, complete darkness, and complete cold, a single nodule can take ten million years to grow to the size of your fist, building itself one dissolved metal atom at a time.Millions of them are now being sought after by mining companies. On the surface, the…

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket took off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on a calm Monday morning in November 2025, carrying something unrelated to Silicon Valley aspirations or billionaire space dreams. Around 1,300 kilometers above the surface of a planet whose oceans are slowly and ceremoniously rising, the Copernicus Sentinel-6B satellite broke away from the rocket at 06:21 Central European Time and started its slow arc into orbit. The first signal was received by the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany, at 07:54. It was weak and technical, but it seemed to be sufficient to bring relief…

Blackbelly rosefish have been kept alive under conditions that resemble the deep Atlantic in a lab at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School, a research facility situated along the edge of Biscayne Bay, where the water changes from green to deep blue within a few miles. 6 degrees Celsius is cold water. elevated pressure. Almost dark. The fish, which were extracted from depths of 350 to 430 meters, appear unremarkable. Spiny, reddish, and visually unremarkable. However, what scientists discovered within them is subtly changing the way ocean chemists view the planet’s carbon budget. Carbonate minerals are expelled from the fish’s…

Approximately 4.5 million square kilometers of the Pacific seafloor, built up over millions of years into one of the planet’s more geologically rich oceanic regions, lie peacefully and darkly between Hawaii and Mexico. Polymetallic nodules filled with cobalt, nickel, and manganese—the exact metals that battery manufacturers have been eyeing for years—are scattered throughout the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, or CCZ as researchers like to refer to it. The tuna also seem to be moving in that direction more and more. According to a study published in npj Ocean Sustainability, commercially important tuna species like skipjack, yellowfin, and bigeye are being driven eastward…

The math of the deep ocean has an almost cruel quality. The entire process, which may take a few hours, involves a mining vessel dragging equipment across the seafloor to remove nodules that took millions of years to form. The recuperation? These days, scientists think it might take a thousand or several thousand years. It’s not a typo. That isn’t a dramatic exaggeration. In fact, that is what the research indicates. More than 5,400 invertebrate fossils extracted from a sediment core off the coast of Santa Barbara were examined in a seminal study headed by UC Davis scientist Sarah Moffitt,…

Jasmine Monroe, a young Inupiaq and Yupik woman living in the village of Elim on Alaska’s Bering Strait, learned via a government website that industrial seabed mining leases were being considered for the ocean that provides beluga, walrus, seals, and whales to her community. A 30-day public comment period was launched by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. No one made a prior call. No one came to visit. The clock began to run when the comment period opened. “It just feels like the system is set up for failure for us,” she replied. It’s difficult to disagree. Under the…

A change in the air used to indicate something trustworthy during a specific late afternoon hour along Shanghai’s waterfront, London’s Thames embankment, or lower Manhattan’s Hudson. Cooler maritime air was drawn inland like a slow exhale by the pressure differential created by the land absorbing heat all day while the ocean did not. It wasn’t overly dramatic. It was merely wind. However, it was crucial for coastal cities because it provided a daily respite, a natural air purification, and a few degrees of relief from the oppressive urban heat. The wind is getting weaker. It is already measurably declining in…

Before most people were awake, it began to rain. Early on Sunday morning, Kansas City’s humidity was already below 89%, and precipitation was falling in “periodically heavy” bursts, according to forecasters. While this description sounds measured, it doesn’t fully convey what it’s like to walk outside near the Country Club Plaza and feel the air pressing back against you like a warm, wet wall. 48 km/h wind gusts were coming from the east. At 16°C, the RealFeel temperature was nearly three degrees lower than the real reading. In other words, the city was getting soaked. It’s not just a bad…