Hurricane season brings with it a certain kind of dread—not the storm itself, but the hours leading up to it, when you watch the forecast cone change on your screen and wonder how accurate any of it is. Most people believe that the best data is somewhere. They believe the system is operational. That assumption needs to be seriously examined right now. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has spent decades developing what many meteorologists believe to be the world’s most advanced weather forecasting infrastructure, including ocean buoys sending live data from the Atlantic, satellites measuring ocean temperatures, and weather…
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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The idea that parts of the Pacific seafloor, which are so far away and so dark that most people will never be able to see them, are being put up for auction this summer seems a little surreal. Not in a far-off future. this summer. And perhaps all the way through autumn. That is the current state of affairs in Washington, where the Trump administration is acting at a rate that has shocked even those who anticipated swift action. President Trump issued an executive order in April of last year with the goal of creating a deep-sea mining sector virtually…
A fisherman named Thanh hauls in his nets on a calm morning along the Vietnamese coast and discovers that they are lighter than they have been in years. He has been venturing farther—perilously farther—and returning with less. He can figure out why without a satellite report. A few weeks ago, he saw the big ships sail by, their lights flickering on the horizon like a city moving slowly. The water felt different by the time they were gone. Emptier. This is not a singular incident. Small-scale fishermen are complaining about the same thing throughout Southeast Asia, from the Gulf of…
China is the world leader in deep-sea exploration, and the distance between Beijing and Washington is widening. The sight of a white research ship zigzagging across the Northwest Pacific, ostensibly cataloguing potato-shaped rocks on the ocean floor, while its location beacon periodically blinks off the map, is subtly unsettling. Since 2016, that ship, the Xiang Yang Hong 01, which translates to “Facing the Red Sun” with almost poetic bluntness, has been doing just that. Furthermore, it might not be the only one doing more than it seems. Eight Chinese state-owned ships officially designated for deep-sea mining research were tracked in…
For many years, the island nations of the Pacific held a moral significance that larger, more affluent nations were unable to match. Their leaders represented coastlines that were already engulfing villages when they stood at the podium of international climate summits, not GDP figures or carbon credit schemes. Geographical location, lived urgency, and a collective voice that remained remarkably cohesive for the most part all contributed to that credibility. Therefore, it’s difficult to ignore how rapidly that unity is starting to waver. The ocean floor is directly traversed by the fault line. The industrial extraction of mineral deposits from seamounts,…
A reef that just vanishes has a subtle, unsettling quality. Not overfished, not bleached, not destroyed by development—just gone. As if the ocean had chosen to hold its breath, it was absent from the fossil record for over a millennium. Scientists are just now starting to figure out why, but that is precisely what occurred some 5,000 years ago deep beneath the waters off the Galápagos Islands. One of the most comprehensive ecological timelines ever put together for deep-sea ecosystems was created by researchers at the University of Bristol and published in PNAS. The study reconstructed 117,000 years of deep-water…
The fact that humans have mapped the surface of Mars more thoroughly than the bottom of our own oceans is subtly unsettling. If you were to watch a 72-foot autonomous ship slip out of the harbor and into open water in July 2022 while standing at the edge of San Francisco Bay, you might assume you were witnessing something commonplace. A boat is departing. occurs daily. However, the Saildrone Surveyor was sailing toward the unknown, bound for areas of the Alaskan seafloor that no instrument, much less a human, had ever meaningfully documented. You are stopped cold by the numbers…
There is a certain type of carelessness that appears with the best of intentions. When marine ecologist Andrew Thaler boarded the MV NorSky off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2008, he sincerely thought that deep-sea mining could be done ethically and that the seafloor could release its metals without losing its soul. He wasn’t innocent. He was a meticulous scientist working with Nautilus Minerals, a mining company, to determine whether extraction at Solwara I, a hydrothermal vent field, could continue with the least amount of environmental damage. His perspective was drastically altered by what he saw on the…
A commercial fisherman pulls up something that was never supposed to be on the hook during a brief, usually hectic moment on the water. A drowsy, tangled loggerhead sea turtle. An Atlantic sturgeon that shouldn’t be there is breaking the surface. A sawfish with small teeth. What a fisherman knows or doesn’t know can make the difference between a dead animal and one that has been recovered in those brief moments. Furthermore, it can increasingly mean the difference between a career that is quietly collapsing due to federal infractions and a license that remains intact. NOAA Fisheries is attempting to…
Eleven men perished on a drilling platform sixty miles off the coast of Louisiana early on April 20, 2010, and the federal government’s relationship with offshore oil has never fully recovered. Not only did the Deepwater Horizon rig sink, but it also created a wound in the Gulf floor that bled for 87 days in a row, releasing an estimated 134 million gallons of crude into waters that were home to bottlenose dolphins, shrimp fleets, and Kemp’s ridley sea turtle nesting grounds. That statistic does not age silently. It’s important to note that NOAA mobilized within three hours of the…