Author: Derrick Lester

A simulation with no obvious conclusion is being conducted on servers in a data center in Brussels. The simulation is the ocean, or at least as near to a useful approximation of it as any computing system has yet tried. Satellite altimetry data from Copernicus and bathymetric surveys gathered over decades by research vessels from twelve European nations are being combined with temperature gradients collected by sensors on the North Sea seabed. The end product is a living, updateable model of the marine environment that can be queried, altered, and run forward in time to find out what happens next.…

Modernizing the deep-sea mining licensing framework under a domestic statute that dates back to 1980 is a regulatory process that most people in Washington have hardly noticed, but staff members at NOAA’s Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management in Silver Spring, Maryland, have been working thru. The procedure is silent, detailed, and presented in a purposefully bureaucratic manner. In actuality, it amounts to the United States getting ready to approve the commercial extraction of polymetallic nodules from international seabed regions without consulting the organization that the rest of the world acknowledges as having jurisdiction over just that. The multilateral…

With the casual efficiency of an animal that has done this ten thousand times, a harbor seal on a California research pier surfaces with a fish in its mouth and hauls itself onto a floating platform. What transpired during the dive is less observable from any reasonable distance. The water in which the fish had been swimming just prior to the seal’s arrival was still in motion, with tiny vortices and pressure waves spinning off the fish’s tail in patterns that continued in the water long after the fish had changed course. The fish escaped the seal’s notice. The water…

The sediment contains a chemistry that took millions of years to stabilize in the nearly freezing water of the abyssal plain, far below the surface of the Central Pacific. It’s not noticeable, it’s not spectacular, and it doesn’t look like what you see in pictures of marine life. It’s chemical—dissolved metals bound to organic molecules in the water that fill the voids between the grains of sediment, an equilibrium system that the organisms that live in and on that sediment have adapted to throughout geological time. In ways that the scientific community is just starting to comprehend, polymetallic nodule mining…

The devices that scrape the ocean floor don’t appear to be the type of machinery that permanently alters ecosystems. They are unglamorous: mechanical rakes slicing thru material that hasn’t been disturbed in geological time, hefty dredge heads dragging behind ships, and suction pipes drawing sediment up from the bottom. What they’re doing is imperceptible from the surface. It’s total from below. Every year, between 4 and 8 billion tons of marine sediment are extracted worldwide. This figure includes a variety of activities, such as the deeper seabed mining operations that have garnered the most recent regulatory attention, offshore sand extraction…

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…