Antarctica acted like the quiet student in the back of the climate change classroom for a very long time. Summer after summer, the Arctic was noisy, losing ice in plain sight, and the satellite photos were almost embarrassing in how accurately they depicted the situation. Somehow, Antarctica remained calm. Its sea ice even slightly increased through the late 2000s, providing scientists with a genuine conundrum to ponder and a new topic of discussion in some online forums. It’s difficult to ignore how frequently nature deviates from model predictions, at least until it does so abruptly. Then, in 2015, the floor…
Author: Derrick Lester
Derrick Lester
Derrick Lester is a professor and editor at indeep-project.org. His academic career has been molded by a single, enduring obsession: the sea and all life in it. Drawing from marine biology, oceanography, and the kind of hard-won field knowledge that only comes from spending significant time on and under the water, Derrick's writing has the depth of a scholar thanks to his years of research and teaching experience. His writing delves into the science of marine life with the inquisitiveness of someone who has never fully moved past the wonder of what exists beneath the surface. Derrick hopes to introduce readers to a world that encompasses over 70% of the planet and is, in many respects, still largely unexplored through his contributions to indeep-project.org.
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Seeing the Pacific act like it’s August while standing on a pier in mid-May has a peculiar quality. The numbers below reveal a different picture, even though the water off northern California still has the typical grey-green sheen this time of year. The agency’s own marine heatwave alert system, which was developed in 2019 to monitor precisely this kind of thing, is now being asked to interpret something it was never quite intended for. NOAA’s satellites have been detecting an exceptionally warm sheet of ocean that just won’t go away. The northeast Pacific reached an average surface temperature of 20.6°C…
A Lion’s Mane jellyfish floats past a slope of old sediment somewhere beneath the Arctic ice, in water so chilly and dark it seems almost unreal. The scene is described almost reverently by researchers who have spent years lowering cameras into that black water. It’s peculiar down there. Silent. Almost nothing on the surface is stable in this sense. The scientists who first mapped this ecosystem are now publicly concerned that it might be destroyed before most people even realize it exists, following decades of slow, laborious discovery. It’s not a dramatic warning. After years of observing a slow problem…
In areas that hardly anyone can see, the ocean is changing. The water is heating up below the sunlit upper layers, far below the depths where most of us think warming really matters. It’s the kind of detail that doesn’t make the evening news, in part because the deep sea has always seemed to be the planet’s quiet basement—far away, chilly, and purportedly unaffected by whatever mayhem is happening on the surface. As it happens, that assumption was wishful thinking. Nitrosopumilus maritimus, one of the most prevalent microorganisms in the ocean, may be subtly adjusting to all of this, according…
A meeting that concludes without a decision has a subtly unsettling quality. Fishing fleets continue, delegates depart, statements are released, and the seabed, kilometers below, remains unchanged. At the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean meeting this year, member states had the opportunity to increase the current bottom-trawl prohibition from 1,000 meters to 800 meters. They didn’t. And the ensuing silence was louder than most people thought it would be. Naturally, conservation organizations were unimpressed. It sounds like advocacy rhetoric until you read the pilot data, but Oceana and MedReAct referred to it as a missed turning point. The studies…
Those who have spent weeks aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer claim that the first thing you notice on the bridge is not the cold. It’s the silence. When someone yells “land ahoy” after days of seeing nothing but pale, restless grey, the moment carries more weight than it probably should. The icebreaker moves through Antarctic water with a kind of mechanical patience. That is precisely what UC Santa Cruz chemical oceanographer Phoebe Lam said during her third visit. A scientist’s sense of scale is reset by something about Antarctica. Thousands of gallons of seawater and pieces of sea ice are…
The Gulf of Cadiz has always been an odd body of water. It serves as a sort of underwater intersection between the Moroccan coast and the Iberian Peninsula, where the cooler Atlantic meets the warm, salty Mediterranean outflow and vanishes downward in slow, looping plumes that are invisible to satellites. It has been studied for decades by oceanographers. For the most part, they used the traditional method of studying it, lowering probes from research vessels one slow descent at a time. Therefore, there was no immediate excitement when a team processing eight seismic reflection sections—which had been shot in the…
The scenery starts to change about thirty miles west of Houston’s downtown. The billboards get thinner, the freeways get flatter, and what was once cattle land is now home to industrial parks called Empire West. It’s the type of location that rarely makes headlines. That’s going to change. According to most accounts, Tesla has quietly started establishing a solar panel manufacturing facility in Brookshire, a small Texas city nestled along Interstate 10. The location is adjacent to the company’s Megapack Megafactory, which is currently being built. It seems intentional to combine the two on one campus. Placing the electricity-generating panels…
When you take a humid morning drive south from Cambridge, Maryland, you begin to notice things you had not previously noticed. A row of corn at a field’s edge, with shorter, paler stalks that appear nearly translucent in the sunlight. a roadside ditch that shouldn’t be filled with water. A tractor that is parked far enough away from the damp ground so that the farmer is obviously aware of something that a casual visitor is not. These subdued signals are common along the Eastern Shore, and they don’t make for striking images. In a sense, that is the entire issue.…
The National Science Foundation is currently experiencing an odd silence, the kind that descends upon an organization when its leadership is unclear. The agency has been without a confirmed director and deputy director for over a year. The number of employees has decreased by over thirty percent. Once-predictable grant decisions have slowed, stalled, or just stopped. Additionally, a nomination is sitting on a desk in Washington, awaiting an unspecified hearing date. James O’Neill is the Trump administration’s nominee to lead an organization that has covertly funded some of the most significant scientific wagers in American history for eight decades. The…