Author: Derrick Lester

The number 0.001 percent has a subtle humble quality. The percentage of Earth’s deep seafloor that humans have ever seen up close is the kind of number that takes some time to come to terms with. Not detected by sonar from a research vessel’s hull, not mapped by satellite, but truly observed by cameras or human eyes. a region about the size of Rhode Island. That figure feels more like an admission than a data point on a planet that is 71% ocean and 90% deep sea. In May 2025, a study that was published in Science Advances made this…

Finding out that industrial fishing fleets operating in near-total obscurity are methodically scraping the ocean floor—a location that most of us will never see, photograph, or visit—is almost surreal. Not in a single place. Everywhere. Weighted nets sinking hundreds of meters through chilly, dark water drag about the area of a football field clean every second of every day. Coral formations that existed before the Roman Empire are being reduced to gravel in a matter of minutes somewhere down there. Deepwater bottom trawling has been referred to by marine scientists as the “clear-cutting of the ocean,” a comparison that seems…

A threat that is invisible has a profoundly unsettling quality. The surface of the Arctic Ocean is the same as it has always been: vast, cold, and gray. However, something has been subtly altering for years a few hundred feet below, along the shallow continental shelf north of Siberia. Methane is starting to leak from ice-like crystalline structures known as hydrates or clathrates, where it has been trapped for millennia. Scientists on research vessels have observed columns of gas bubbles rising through the water column like slow-motion warning signals, but not dramatically or in a single catastrophic event just yet.…

Observing a color vanish from the world’s oceans has a subtle, unsettling quality. Only satellite sensors and deep learning algorithms tracking decades’ worth of chlorophyll data across millions of square miles of open water can measure it in fractions rather than dramatically or all at once. The greenery of the oceans is diminishing. Furthermore, the ramifications of that one sentence go well beyond what would fit neatly into a news cycle. Between 50 and 80 percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere is produced by microscopic, mostly invisible phytoplankton, which is in decline. A seminal study that monitored chlorophyll concentrations…

It doesn’t take long to realize how much is at risk when standing waist deep in a mangrove forest in Colombia. The roots cling to one another like fingers, the water is dark, and beneath the sediment are centuries’ worth of stored carbon, silently accomplishing what entire industries are unable to. Apple is relying on this type of location in collaboration with Conservation International. With a projected lifespan of one million metric tons of CO2, their 27,000-acre mangrove project in Colombia is the first fully accounted carbon offset credit for a mangrove ecosystem. It sounds almost too tidy. And it…

When the boats have nowhere to go, a certain silence descends upon a fishing dock. It’s not quiet and serene. It’s the type that builds up in conversations that stray, empty fuel receipts, and partially consumed coffee. That silence has been growing louder along the working waterfronts of Oregon and Washington for years, and the cause is something that is taking place far below the surface. Fish migrations throughout the Pacific Northwest are being altered by ocean warming in ways that are subtly destroying a generation-old way of life. When the fish are expected to arrive, the water is warmer…

The concept of a network of hydrophones sitting thousands of meters below the surface of the ocean, silently recording every tremor and groan of the Pacific without anyone having to be there, is almost unsettling. Not a ship. Not a crew. Just sound, passing through chilly, dark water, and reaching a sensor that records everything without complaining. This is precisely what the new passive acoustic monitoring systems currently undergoing testing and deployment throughout the Pacific basin accomplish. The implications for tracking submarine volcanic activity are so profound that scientists who have dedicated their careers to the issue are using terms…

The idea that you can know a creature was present somewhere without ever seeing it has a subtle disorienting quality. No picture, no sonar ping, no unintentional trawl net bringing something bright and frightening to the surface. Just water—regular seawater—carrying imperceptible biological clues that an animal was present, moving through the shadows, and conducting whatever business a giant squid does at depths where sunlight has never reached. That’s basically what happened off the coast of Ningaloo, Australia, in 2020. The expedition’s findings, which were published earlier this year in the journal Environmental DNA, are still causing a stir in the…

Standing at the Atlantic’s edge on a typical afternoon, there is a moment when the vast, gray-green ocean appears unchanged. The waves always break in the same manner. Overhead, gulls wheel. It seems to last forever. It isn’t. The Atlantic just recorded its hottest year ever recorded, according to scientists. What’s more difficult to accept is the almost casual certainty with which scientists deliver the news: this is not the worst of it. Climate tracking organizations report that ocean heat content has broken records worldwide for nine years running, but the Atlantic’s numbers are quite different. Surface temperatures in large…

There are creatures somewhere in the South Pacific, about six kilometers below the ocean’s surface, that were around when the last non-avian dinosaurs roamed the planet. They don’t have much drama. They don’t move quickly. By all scientific standards, they have been doing very little for about 100 million years, but they woke up when scientists eventually persuaded them to enter a lab and offered them food. They grew in number. They seemed to be alright. Knowing exactly what to do with that information is difficult. The University of Rhode Island and a number of other organizations collaborated with the…