Author: Derrick Lester

Powered almost completely by sunshine, a yellow torpedo-shaped drone about the size of a kayak is cruising the Pacific Ocean. Not a crew. There isn’t a support vessel following it. Only the car, the sea, and any sensors it has been instructed to carry—listening, measuring, observing, and perhaps sending a brief burst of encrypted data to a satellite before going silent once more. It has been out there for several weeks. It may remain out there for several more months. One of the more subtly significant technological innovations to emerge from San Diego in recent years is Seasats’ Lightfish. With…

California is familiar with atmospheric rivers in the same way as those who live around the coast are familiar with hurricanes, based on what they leave behind and the names people give them. An estimated $30 billion in damage was inflicted by the storms that pounded the state during the winters of 2022 and 2023, flooding agriculture in the Central Valley, submerging mountain villages, and turning rivers brown. They were referred regarded as historic events by scientists. According to a recent study that was published in Nature Communications in May, the term “historic” may grow increasingly commonplace as the century…

Methane is leaking several hundred meters below the South Atlantic’s surface along a continental slope where warm intermediate water pushes against old sediment. Not in a visually striking way—no abrupt rupture, no bubbles bursting the surface. just a gradual, pressured journey upward through seafloor fissures that enter the water column through eruptions known as scientists as “cold seeps.” The procedure has been going on for a while. The rate and the factors influencing it have changed. One of the most energy-dense natural structures on Earth is methane hydrates, often known as clathrates. They arise when the proper mix of temperature…

The United States believed it understood the ocean better than anyone else during the most of the previous century. For a very long period, that assumption was true. Together, American research organizations, NOAA, and the Navy created a picture of the world’s underwater environment that was unmatched by any other nation. This picture was significant from a scientific, commercial, and military standpoint. Beijing had a major role in making that picture less complete than it once was. The majority of China’s 64 oceanographic research vessels were constructed in the last 15 years. In terms of the number of ships, that…

A yellow torpedo-shaped robot, roughly eight and a half feet long, is currently drifting silently through the darkness somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. Not a crew. The propeller is not spinning. The majority of the work is done by the slow, patient physics of buoyancy, which propels it through the water at around one knot, which is slower than a human walking, while it gathers ocean data that scientists on land are evaluating in almost real time. I’m Redwing. Constructed in the United States by Teledyne Marine, it was launched off the shore of Martha’s Vineyard in October 2025 and…

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…