Author: Derrick Lester

Around 3,600 meters below the surface of the Southern Ocean, in conditions that would kill a person in minutes, there lives a small sphere-shaped animal that is covered in hooks. It’s not like its cousins in that it filters water. It looks for food. Recently, scientists got video of this thing from the ocean and gave it the name “death ball” sponge. That name is so scary that it’s hard to stay focused on the video. The find is part of a bigger haul from two trips earlier this year by researchers from The Nippon Foundation-Nekton Ocean Census, who worked…

Almost nothing can be seen about the systems that make weather forecasts possible. A lot of people don’t give the underwater gliders, seafloor sensors, and moored buoys that float somewhere in the Southern Ocean much thought. They’re not known by many people. But forecasters, farmers, emergency managers, and insurance actuaries will all feel it eventually, sometimes before they know what hit them. Scientists are warning about this right now, as the Trump administration works to break down the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a huge network of $368 million systems and platforms on the ocean floor that is run by the US…

The United States built the internet, went to the moon, and sent robots to Mars. But at some point, it never got around to writing a clear plan for the deep ocean floor, which is one of the most resource-rich and strategically important places on Earth. It’s easy to miss that gap in Washington’s busy policy agenda, but it’s quietly becoming one of the biggest mistakes of this decade. The United States made deep seabed mining a national priority in April 2025. China’s stricter rules on exporting critical minerals, which are used in defense systems, advanced chips, and AI hardware,…

Making a map of the ocean floor with sound seems almost counterintuitive. Sound, not light, radar, or cameras. Pulses of vibration are sent down through dark, pressurized water. They hit sediment and rock and bounce back up, carrying information about a world that most people will never see. The Danish acoustic technology company RESON, which is now part of Teledyne Marine, has built its whole fifty-year history around this idea. The company has been around for fifty years this February. It is a quiet event, but people in the marine science world seem to feel it. When RESON was started…

For many years, climate scientists felt calm and at ease when they saw the ocean. People don’t really understand buffer systems, so they didn’t say it out loud, but somewhere in the models and measurements was this reassuring constant: the sea was taking in about 30% of all the carbon dioxide that people put into the air. Every year. In peace. Not with credit. It seems like we took that for granted in ways that we’re only now starting to understand. That taking in was never a given. The cold, deep water took carbon dioxide from the surface and carried…

When it comes to climate science, good news can be a little unsettling. When scientists said that the Southern Ocean could still absorb carbon dioxide even though it had been warming up and winds getting stronger for decades, it seemed like a relief. Scientists felt better. Climate modelers didn’t understand. The real story was just starting to come to the surface somewhere in the cold water around Antarctica. An investigation from the Alfred Wegener Institute has begun to explain what is happening down there. The explanation is both clever and unsettling. This turns out to be the Southern Ocean’s way…

It’s a little unsettling to think that the ocean floor is being mapped out before a lease sale. The floor is miles below the surface, is always dark, and is under so much pressure that it would crush a car like a paper cup. Not looked into out of interest. Set up for inventory. Most people didn’t notice that change happening quickly. In April 2025, an executive order told federal agencies to act quickly on important minerals found in the United States. Yes, they did. The Interior Department combined two offshore agencies into a new group called the Marine Minerals…

The fact that you can feel the ground moving under your feet is a little unsettling. Not in the way that a garden or forest floor is alive with bugs and roots that you can see and name. The thing that lies much deeper is something else. Something moves so slowly that the word “life” seems like it needs to be rethought. The deep biosphere is not talked about in the same way that oceanographers or ecologists talk about coral reefs or rainforests. The way they talk makes me think that they are still thinking about what they’ve found because…

Coral reefs make a lot of noise. There is a low, constant hum of biological activity all around you, like underwater static made up of pops, clicks, thumps, and snaps. Anyone who has dived one knows this. It’s mostly made from shrimp. It comes from fish in some cases. And until not long ago, almost none of it could be identified in a scientifically useful way. Things are beginning to change. Scientists from Cornell University, Aalto University in Finland, and the conservation technology nonprofit FishEye Collaborative have made a tool that can tell in real time which fish is making…

Something very strange about a ship that doesn’t make it home very often stands out. Most ships come back on time, tie up at the dock, and get back to normal. The NOAA Ship Ronald H. Brown did something different. During a multiyear deployment that began in July 2013 in Charleston, the ship traveled nearly 130,000 miles of open ocean, going from Iceland to Antarctica and from Alaska to the deep Pacific. When it returned, it brought back scientific information that, in some cases, did not exist before. That’s a big thing to say. Most of the Earth is covered…