Author: Derrick Lester

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…

It was very full in the conference room in Nairobi. Over 18,000 people from 184 countries and more than 300 events crammed into just a few days came together to save the ocean. The speeches were very emotional. There were more than 1,400 commitments. There was also a very uncomfortable question that wasn’t asked much during the networking lunches and the panel discussions about ocean acidification: who benefits when we talk about ocean exploitation in terms of sustainability? That is the main conflict at the heart of what is now called the “blue economy.” At first glance, this idea seems…

Divers say that the ocean changes completely when you go below the surface off the coast of California. The noise goes away. The light changes. It looks more like a cathedral than an ecosystem if you’re swimming through a healthy kelp forest. The long amber stalks rise at least 100 feet from the seafloor, the leafy blades spread out at the surface, and light falls through them in thin, shimmering columns. Someone who lives in Santa Cruz and works as an oceanographer for the U.S. Geological Survey has called it “beautiful, like its own little universe.” It is a universe…

A quietly interesting thing about this is that the same group that helped India get to the moon is now working to send people to the bottom of the ocean. India’s first deep-sea submersible that can carry people is being built at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), which is an ISRO facility better known for making rocket parts and spacecraft structures. It’s called Samudrayaan. The name of the car is Matsya-6000. And by 2027, three Indian aquanauts will go down six kilometers into the ocean if everything goes as planned. That depth is not a small thing. The water…

A peaceful stretch of ocean floor runs along the edge of North America, where the land slowly disappears and falls into the deep Atlantic. This area probably doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it should. It’s known as the continental slope by scientists. A lot of people have never heard of it. What worries researchers like Uri ten Brink, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, is that not enough people know about these underwater canyons. He has spent years mapping them, one sonar image at a time, looking for something that no one wants to find. Based on…

Most of us have a fixed mental picture of the ocean: it’s bright, full of people, and lit by the sun. Reefs made of coral. A lot of fish are near the surface, catching light. It looks like the ocean in documentaries and vacation pictures. However, that picture of the sea only shows a very small part of what’s down there. Around 95% of the ocean’s volume is always cold and dark, and most things that try to stay alive think that it is always hostile. However. There is life down there, and it comes in forms that continue to…