Author: Derrick Lester

There is a part of the ROV footage from the E/V Nautilus expedition in 2015 that still feels very personal for a scientific find. Someone on the ship says almost under their breath, “He’s tiny. It’s blue.” as the camera slowly moves across the ocean floor near Darwin Island, which is named after the man who also came to the Galapagos and couldn’t quite explain what he saw. Something is said by that reaction. These are people who study the deep sea. They’ve seen weird things before. Still, this small animal, about the size of a golf ball, that was…

The ocean did something amazing for decades, and no one asked it to. It quietly and without complaining took in about a quarter of all the carbon dioxide that people put into the air every year. Scientists knew this could not last any longer. It’s still scary to see the numbers going in the wrong direction, though. Researchers were getting more and more worried about what a new report from NOAA’s ocean monitoring work showed: parts of the ocean aren’t absorbing carbon like they used to. In some places, the situation has changed. CO2 used to be pulled down by…

In late July, the Ozarks get a certain kind of heat—not the dry, airy kind you get further west, but a heat that is thick, pressing, and impossible to get away from. This week, Springfield, Missouri is right in the middle of it, and the forecast doesn’t look like it will get any better. The high temperature on Monday is expected to reach 37°C, and there will be strong southwest winds in the morning that will change to calm winds in the afternoon. An Extreme Heat Warning has been sent out because it’s so hot, which is both scary and,…

Something very important about this year’s World Oceans Day theme is being kept quiet. It doesn’t tell us to “save” the ocean, which has always felt like an impossible task. There are words like “protect” and “preserve” on too many tote bags for them to lose most of their weight. “Reimagine: Beyond the world we know, a new relationship with our ocean” is the theme for World Oceans Day 2026. The word “reimagine” asks us to do something different. Not just what people post, but also how they think needs to change. It’s not as important as it might seem…

It’s kind of comforting when the weather does pretty much what it’s supposed to do for a week. It looks like late July 2026 will be a settled month at Castle Donington in Leicestershire. The pattern almost seems too good to be normal. Monday starts out cloudy, and it stays that way all morning. The temperature stays between 17 and 18 degrees. By early afternoon, the clouds are gone, and there is real sunshine. At the height of the day, the temperature will be about 22 degrees, which is nice but not too hot. Winds are still light, coming mostly…

Finding out that a process that controls Earth’s climate has been going on in ways scientists didn’t fully understand has been happening in the ocean that covers most of the planet. This is a quietly humbling realization. Researchers came to this realization at the end of last year, when Alyson Santoro, a microbial oceanographer at UCSB, led a team that published results in Nature Geoscience that changed what scientists thought they knew about how carbon is fixed in the deep sea. In short, the microbes that scientists thought were doing most of the carbon-fixing work in the deep ocean—a group…

A line in a new report from the Ocean Panel will stop you in your tracks if you read it slowly enough. It says that ocean-based climate solutions could help cut down on emissions around the world by up to 35% by 2050. 35% of the people. That’s not a mistake with the rounding. That’s not a note at the end. That’s about a third of the work that needs to be done to turn Earth from a habitable planet to something much less forgiving. It’s out there, covering 70% of the planet’s surface, mostly unfunded and unused. The idea…

Living things find amazing ways to stay alive between 200 and 5,000 meters below the surface, where sunlight stops shining. Bioluminescent lures are dangled by anglerfish in almost total darkness. Species that don’t have common names float through the water at pressures that would squash a car. Science had only just begun to sketch out this world, which most people will never get to see. Nova Southeastern University’s research program is centered on the open ocean and its deepest parts. They are now trying to figure out not only what lives down there, but also how those animals are adjusting…

Most people don’t think about the part of America’s critical infrastructure that lies hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean. This part carries internet traffic, oil, natural gas, and electricity across thousands of miles of ocean floor. Cables and pipes under the water. Buildings in ports. Platforms in the ocean. For long periods of time, most of it is not watched over. It is only checked when a ship can get out there, the weather is good, and a crew is available. That is a quite long list of conditions. That’s one reason why Poseidon’s Forge, a small…

The ocean makes me feel uneasy in a quiet way. It looks like nothing is happening at first glance—sunlight spreading out across huge, uninterested waves. But deep down, at the microscopic level, things are happening that could change how quickly the Earth warms up. They are still hard for scientists to understand, and the picture they are painting is not a good one. A group from the University of Rochester published their findings earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They found a specific mechanism that makes methane in the open ocean. Scientists in the…