Author: Derrick Lester

The federal government has revealed plans to sell the rights to mine the seafloor in the deep water off American Samoa, seventy nautical miles northeast of Rose Atoll, where Samoan families have long tracked sea turtles they believe to be ancestral. November 19 is the date of the sale. The deep seafloor has never been mined for profit anywhere on Earth. With a schedule of about eighteen months from sale to possible operation, the United States is aiming to be the first. The first lawsuit against deep-sea mining in American waters was filed on August 18 by Earthjustice. The National…

For more than ten years, the International bottom Authority has been developing a mining code for the deep bottom. When that code was not finished in July 2025, negotiators were sent back to their hotels without reaching an agreement, and a new round of negotiations was set for 2026. In the meanwhile, The Metals Company plans to begin nodule extraction in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone by late 2027 and has published a commercial pre-feasibility study. One of the most significant silences in contemporary environmental governance is the gap between those two timelines, and Duke researchers have been at the forefront of…

Something left a trace in the water somewhere in Western Australia’s Ningaloo coast, in a deep subterranean canyon that descends almost three miles below the surface. Maybe a few skin cells or a thin smear of mucus moved upward by a sluggish stream. If the animal had ever reached the surface at all, it was already gone by the time scientists dropped a sampling bottle to catch it. However, the DNA it left behind was sufficient. The giant squid had been found in Western Australian seas for the third time in recorded history. Seawater samples were taken down to a…

The figures in the deep ocean just didn’t add up for years. Researchers kept detecting more fixation than the known chemistry could account for when they measured the amount of dissolved inorganic carbon being fixed in the sunless layers below the photic zone, which is where photosynthesis terminates and sunlight cannot reach. The widely accepted theory was that the majority of the work was being done by ammonia-oxidizing archaea, which are microscopic organisms that can extract energy from nitrogen molecules. The issue was that the ambient water’s nitrogen content was insufficient to support the carbon fixation rates that the instruments…

Deep-sea oceanography requires a certain type of patience, not the kind that comes from waiting for results, but the kind that comes from acknowledging that you just can’t know what you’re looking at until you’ve looked at enough of it. Unlike a single voyage, a ship that has been at sea for months without coming back to port gains continuity. The seasonal swings, the gradual temperature changes at depth, the motions of species that follow cycles measured in months rather than hours. A quick research cruise captures a moment. A lengthy journey captures a tale. With NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer…

Something is shining on the deep ocean below, where sunlight has never reached and the water temperature remains close to freezing. Thousands of them all at once, at depths ranging from a few hundred to several thousand meters. Synchronous signals are flashed by lanternfish. Dinoflagellates that follow a current in the wake of a cold blue light. Luminescent clouds are released by shrimp to fool predators in utter darkness, with light from a single organism traveling across meters of otherwise dark water. For hundreds of millions of years, this has been the case. The temperature surrounding everything is changing, and…

A survey team from Shell Oil was searching the Gulf of Mexico’s seafloor in 2011 for potential drilling locations. The image that their sonar produced didn’t resemble geology. It was almost three-quarters of a mile underwater, measuring around 84 feet long by 26 feet wide, a configuration that no natural creation could have. Shell had a legal obligation to inform federal authorities. Investigators would later determine that what they had discovered was a copper-clad early nineteenth-century sailing ship that most likely sank in the same storm as two other ships discovered within five miles of it. The Monterrey Shipwreck, as…

There are fields of black boulders about the size of potatoes in the abyssal plain between Hawaii and Mexico, four kilometers below the Pacific Ocean’s surface, in almost complete darkness. They have been accumulating manganese, cobalt, nickel, and copper from the sluggish chemistry of the deep water for millions of years. They have never been mined for profit. The regulatory authorities tasked with overseeing that process are currently finding it difficult to keep up with the increasing number of businesses and governments attempting to modify that as soon as feasible. Land is where the urgency originates. About 70% of the…

A significant amount of this nation’s financial transactions, diplomatic communications, and internet traffic are currently carried by a fiber-optic cable about the thickness of a garden hose that is currently laying on the Atlantic Ocean floor. It is so near the seafloor that it can be severed by a ship’s anchor if it is tugged at the incorrect angle in the wrong location. Until the outage reports began to come in, no one standing above the water would be aware that anything had occurred. This isn’t speculative. Since late 2024, at least eight such cable cutting have happened in the…

Imagine a fifty-story-tall turbine anchored to the ocean floor by cables the thickness of a tiny vehicle, rather than on a concrete pile pushed into the ocean floor. In the swells, it sways a little. It is more expensive per megawatt than nearly everything that has been constructed by mankind to produce electricity. Additionally, the industry that is betting on it is currently working in secret to determine whether it will ever be sufficiently affordable to be significant. In the energy transition, floating offshore wind is in a rather uncomfortable situation. The finest winds in the world blow over deep…