Author: Derrick Lester

You can still see blue tarps when driving via some of Puerto Rico’s interior. Not all of them, nor as many as in 2018, but enough to indicate what remains unfinished. One of the most devastating storms to ever hit the island, Hurricane Maria made landfall in September 2017. Since then, the recovery has been genuine but uneven, with a patchwork of rebuilt schools, neighborhoods, and still-vulnerable infrastructure that has taken longer than most people anticipated due to the island’s financial situation and a complex federal relationship. Although not always so, the power grid is now more resilient than it…

The titanium sphere that makes up the crew compartment of the research submersible Alvin rests in a workshop at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, appearing very straightforward. It is bolted into the larger vessel structure surrounding it and has a diameter of about two meters. It is smooth and slightly worn from decades of operation. The engineering rationale behind its design is not conveyed by its appearance. However, that shape—the sphere—is the key solution to an issue that has plagued materials engineers and naval architects ever since people attempted to descend into deep water without being annihilated by…

A titanium-housed device on the seafloor off the Oregon coast is measuring the weight of the water above it with an accuracy that would be astounding even in a controlled laboratory setting, at a depth where sunlight hasn’t reached in geological time. It continuously records data via a fiber-optic cable that travels back to shore, where the readings are added to a stream of data that geodesists and seismologists use to watch one of North America’s most dangerous fault systems breathe in slow motion. Stretching approximately 1,000 kilometers along the Pacific Northwest coast, the Cascadia Subduction Zone extends from Northern…

A mining test vehicle was dropped by cable into the Pacific Ocean in 1979 and drove across an abyssal plain that was unknown to the majority of people alive at the time. The biological communities that inhabit the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which is located between Hawaii and Mexico at a depth of around 4,500 meters, function on timelines that don’t correspond to anything in the typical human experience since the water there is so dark and frigid. The test vehicle made tracks in the mud as it went across the seafloor, agitating the material and crushing nodules and the organisms that…

Located about 200 miles southwest of Guam in the western Pacific, the Mariana Trench is so deep that the summit of Mount Everest would still be more than a mile underwater if it were thrown into it. It is, by most accounts, the most isolated place on Earth; it is separated from the surface by about 11 kilometers of frigid water, is lightless, and is under pressure that most materials cannot survive. It is like exploring a different planet, according to researchers who have sent sensors and submersibles inside it. They discovered something unsettlingly familiar in the tissues of the…

The water appears fine on a late July morning at Norwalk Harbor. It’s the kind of morning that makes the Connecticut coastline seem precisely what it is: a region where the Sound runs south into Long Island, appearing serene and deep blue in the early light, where yachts are moored close to train terminals, and where commuter towns meet the coast. Nothing is revealed by the surface. However, water temperatures rising into ranges that the ecosystem under that surface was not designed for are being recorded by the monitoring buoys moored in the channels, something that the image cannot convey.…

A map can be found somewhere in a NOAA server environment. It is the result of years of submersible surveys, acoustic seafloor mapping, deep-water camera deployments, and the kind of meticulous data integration that requires research careers rather than individual study initiatives. The cold-water coral gardens perched at 1,000 meters, the ancient sponge fields covering the flanks of seamounts, the slow-growing communities that take centuries to reach maturity and minutes of trawl contact to destroy, and the locations of the deep ocean’s most delicate and biologically significant habitats are all depicted with a resolution that would have been unattainable ten…

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,…