Author: Derrick Lester

Standing in front of a wall-mounted screen in a NOAA operations support center, watching a remotely operated camera glide through complete darkness hundreds of meters below the ocean’s surface, and realizing that you’re looking at a habitat that has existed for centuries without anyone ever seeing it, is a subtly unsettling experience. For years, NOAA’s deep-sea coral researchers have had to deal with this reality: a vast, mostly invisible world that keeps coming to light in unexpected ways. It’s hard to understand the numbers by themselves. In just two years, from 2018 to 2019, NOAA and its research partners identified…

The twilight zone of the ocean has a subtle unnerving quality. The layer between 200 and 1,000 meters below the surface is where sunlight fades into something more akin to a permanent grey dusk, rather than the striking darkness of the very deep. This area, known as the mesopelagic zone, has more living biomass than any other place in the ocean, as scientists have long known. They were unable to determine why big predators continued to appear there. Built for speed and surface hunting, great sharks were spending hours in this chilly, dark hallway. The total didn’t add up. The…

A 10-meter robot sinking by itself into complete darkness with no crew, no cable, and no real-time observers—just a pre-loaded route and the crushing weight of eight kilometers of water pressing in from all directions—is quietly amazing. As is typical of Japanese scientific press releases, JAMSTEC’s announcement in July that its unmanned deep-sea vehicle Urashima 8000 had reached 8,015.8 meters in the Izu–Ogasawara Trench was measured and technical. However, the number itself merits some attention. Last year, Japan’s operational map did not include that depth. Fundamentally, the Urashima 8000 is a rebuilt version of the original Urashima probe, which was…

A body of water the size of Ireland sitting essentially dead on the Baltic Sea floor has a subtly unsettling quality. No fish scuttling through the shadows. There are no crabs grazing the silt. Just bacteria, eating the last remnants of oxygen in once-lively water. This is not a scene from a science fiction book. It has been going on for decades and is getting worse every year with a slow-motion certainty that makes it easy to ignore until the fishing boats start returning empty. Since the middle of the 20th century, the number of hypoxic dead zones—areas of ocean…

When a tool that the scientific community has relied on for decades stops functioning as it should, a certain kind of unease spreads throughout the community. That’s about where oceanographers are now, observing how the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the enormous, sluggish heartbeat of the largest ocean in the world, behaves in ways that don’t fit the old playbook. For those who haven’t paid much attention to climate science, the PDO is a recurrent pattern of changes in ocean temperature throughout the North Pacific. It alternates between cool and warm phases, each lasting ten to forty years. Sea surface temperatures cool…

It’s difficult to get rid of the feeling that something permanent is subtly crumbling as you stand on the cliffs close to Scalby in Yorkshire on a chilly morning and watch the sea churn against the rock face below. For thousands of years, these cliffs have existed. However, Imperial College London researchers predict that they won’t look the same by 2100, and perhaps not even by 2030. Sandy beaches shift and erode, as oceanographers have long known. By now, that’s practically common knowledge. The increasing amount of evidence that even hard rock coastlines—the ones we take for granted—are starting to…

A robot arm descended toward the seafloor somewhere off the coast, in water so dark it could swallow a skyscraper whole. It stopped. For life, its camera scanned. When it saw none on the target rock, it reached down, picked up a manganese and nickel-encrusted nodule the size of a potato, and tugged. A tiny cloud of silt blossomed and vanished. The machine continued. According to Impossible Metals, a startup that has centered its entire pitch around the notion that the ocean floor can be harvested without hollowing it out, this is what “responsible” deep-sea mining looks like. The CEO…

Pulling a net out of the ocean and discovering that it is filled with translucent, pulsating masses of jellyfish rather than fish is incredibly unsettling. Since late January, trawler crews off the coast of Bangladesh have been managing dense blooms from deep-sea zones where fish were once abundant enough to justify burning the fuel. There was not a single dramatic event that brought about the shift. As is often the case with climate consequences, it quietly crept in. Surface waters were warmer than normal between November and January due to little rainfall and no seasonal cooling from freshwater runoff. The…

On a calm morning, you almost forget the sea has teeth when you stand on any section of the Coromandel Coast. The water is level. Boats used for fishing drift. In the same way that coastlines always do until they don’t, the whole thing feels gentle and permanent. What’s happening several kilometers below the surface, where temperature changes, pressure changes, and the signals that precede disaster move silently through the water column before anyone on shore has any idea, is what you can’t see and what no one standing there can see. For decades, scientists have been working to close…

When test results are inaccurate, a certain kind of silence occurs in the laboratory. Not incorrect in the sense of a mistake, but incorrect in the sense of something that doesn’t align with what anyone has been taught. When Boston University researchers extracted their samples from more than three kilometers below the Pacific Ocean’s surface and passed them through human immune cells, that seems to be precisely what happened. Nothing took place. There was no response from the cells. And that turns out to be the most concerning outcome imaginable. The expedition was conducted in the Phoenix Islands Protected Area,…