Author: Derrick Lester

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…

A buoy named Peggy bobs quietly in the dark, cold water somewhere in the Bering Sea, far from any shipping lanes or research ships. This is what she’s done since 1995. No big deal. Not any press releases. Only measurements of temperature, salinity, nitrate levels, and current were sent back to scientists on land. A lot of people have never heard of her. Still, Peggy and the hundreds of other ocean monitoring buoys that are spread out around the world’s seas are an important part of a system that scientists have been building for decades to keep track of what…

The tools are already being made. Deep-sea crawlers the size of small warehouses are being tested by engineers in Rotterdam. In Kingston, Jamaica, international delegates are making comments on PDFs while writing rules for a place most of them have never seen and will never see. The race to mine the bottom of the deep sea is no longer just an idea. It is an institution. A less important question keeps getting pushed to the back of the room amidst all the institutional movement: what happens to the carbon? The ocean floor deep below is more than just a place…

Last year, you could see something that doesn’t happen very often: paddleboarders, fishermen, sailors, surfers, and swimmers all getting together in the water. Not to go to a festival. Not for a race. To speak out. The ocean groups wanted to make it clear that they were watching the Underwater Minerals Conference, which was taking place on the island. It says a lot about what is going on in the Cook Islands right now that those people chose the sea as their stage. There isn’t any deep sea mining going on here yet. Companies that work in the waters around…

Along the South Pacific right now, a small yellow cylinder is going down. It will go down to 2,000 meters, take readings of the temperature and salinity, and then rise again and send a signal to a satellite. This takes place in every ocean basin on Earth thousands of times every day. A lot of people have never heard of it. It turns out that most governments don’t know how much they depend on it. That network, which was carefully built over decades with mostly American money and initiative, is now in danger. Not from an enemy power. Not because…

A sea captain in 1751 dropped a temperature gauge on a rope into the subtropical Atlantic and then picked it back up without knowing what he had done. There was no way to explain how shockingly cold the water was almost a mile below. The main thing he did with the discovery was chill his wine. It would be another fifty years before anyone realized what he had really found: proof of a huge, slow, planet-regulating machine that wound through all of Earth’s oceans. Heat has been moving around the Earth for thousands of years thanks to the thermohaline circulation…