Author: Derrick Lester

Making a map of the ocean floor with sound seems almost counterintuitive. Sound, not light, radar, or cameras. Pulses of vibration are sent down through dark, pressurized water. They hit sediment and rock and bounce back up, carrying information about a world that most people will never see. The Danish acoustic technology company RESON, which is now part of Teledyne Marine, has built its whole fifty-year history around this idea. The company has been around for fifty years this February. It is a quiet event, but people in the marine science world seem to feel it. When RESON was started…

For many years, climate scientists felt calm and at ease when they saw the ocean. People don’t really understand buffer systems, so they didn’t say it out loud, but somewhere in the models and measurements was this reassuring constant: the sea was taking in about 30% of all the carbon dioxide that people put into the air. Every year. In peace. Not with credit. It seems like we took that for granted in ways that we’re only now starting to understand. That taking in was never a given. The cold, deep water took carbon dioxide from the surface and carried…

When it comes to climate science, good news can be a little unsettling. When scientists said that the Southern Ocean could still absorb carbon dioxide even though it had been warming up and winds getting stronger for decades, it seemed like a relief. Scientists felt better. Climate modelers didn’t understand. The real story was just starting to come to the surface somewhere in the cold water around Antarctica. An investigation from the Alfred Wegener Institute has begun to explain what is happening down there. The explanation is both clever and unsettling. This turns out to be the Southern Ocean’s way…

It’s a little unsettling to think that the ocean floor is being mapped out before a lease sale. The floor is miles below the surface, is always dark, and is under so much pressure that it would crush a car like a paper cup. Not looked into out of interest. Set up for inventory. Most people didn’t notice that change happening quickly. In April 2025, an executive order told federal agencies to act quickly on important minerals found in the United States. Yes, they did. The Interior Department combined two offshore agencies into a new group called the Marine Minerals…

The fact that you can feel the ground moving under your feet is a little unsettling. Not in the way that a garden or forest floor is alive with bugs and roots that you can see and name. The thing that lies much deeper is something else. Something moves so slowly that the word “life” seems like it needs to be rethought. The deep biosphere is not talked about in the same way that oceanographers or ecologists talk about coral reefs or rainforests. The way they talk makes me think that they are still thinking about what they’ve found because…

Coral reefs make a lot of noise. There is a low, constant hum of biological activity all around you, like underwater static made up of pops, clicks, thumps, and snaps. Anyone who has dived one knows this. It’s mostly made from shrimp. It comes from fish in some cases. And until not long ago, almost none of it could be identified in a scientifically useful way. Things are beginning to change. Scientists from Cornell University, Aalto University in Finland, and the conservation technology nonprofit FishEye Collaborative have made a tool that can tell in real time which fish is making…

Something very strange about a ship that doesn’t make it home very often stands out. Most ships come back on time, tie up at the dock, and get back to normal. The NOAA Ship Ronald H. Brown did something different. During a multiyear deployment that began in July 2013 in Charleston, the ship traveled nearly 130,000 miles of open ocean, going from Iceland to Antarctica and from Alaska to the deep Pacific. When it returned, it brought back scientific information that, in some cases, did not exist before. That’s a big thing to say. Most of the Earth is covered…

It’s interesting to see a government agency announce a big mission to explore the ocean and then talk about it as a business opportunity almost at the same time. That’s pretty much what happened this summer when NOAA announced a 28-day trip on the NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer that would take place in deep water off the Cook Islands in the South Pacific. The mission includes real-time video streams, imaging of the seafloor, and sampling of the water column. It sounds like ocean science from a book. And it is, sort of. The partnership with the Cook Islands is real…

There is something unsettling about a crisis that takes place in the background, out of sight for everyone who isn’t looking for it. That kind of crisis is the loss of phytoplankton in the Pacific Ocean. No exciting visuals. Not any breaking video. It’s just data that scientists have gathered over decades that point in a very worrying direction. The amount of phytoplankton in the Pacific has dropped by about 20% since 1980, according to research from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Between the late 1970s and 2000, the decline in the North Pacific is closer to 30 percent when…

Almost every complicated industrial process has a point where everyone realizes that something they thought would be easy isn’t really easy at all. For the deep sea mining industry, that moment seems to be coming around a type of ship that most people outside the field have never heard of. It’s happening quietly, without any press releases. A STARS vessel is what it’s called. Shuttle Ship For Transport And Resupply. The name sounds pretty simple, almost like an office name. Though, when you learn more about what these ships are supposed to do, you’ll understand why some engineers in this…