Author: Derrick Lester

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…

A network of microphones has been listening nonstop for decades, thousands of feet below the surface of the North Atlantic. They were never meant to look into the weather. It was planned that they would catch submarines. During the Cold War, the U.S. Navy had a real fear that Soviet submarines could sneak across ocean basins without being seen and attack without warning. This led to the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS). Starting in the early 1950s, the Office of Naval Research quietly paid for underwater microphone arrays to be put in place along the ocean floor. These arrays were then…

In El Paso in July, the air feels different when you step outside than it does in most places. The humidity isn’t as bad as it can be in Houston. And the heat is dry and almost sharp. It makes you think you can handle it until you realize you’ve been standing in the sun for four minutes and you’re already dizzy. This is the cruel thing about El Paso summers: they look bearable from inside, but they’re not. At this point in time, El Paso weather hasn’t done this in years. The high temperature is expected to reach 42°C,…

An underwater camera sends back a sound that makes the whole room quiet during a research trip. This sound can be heard anywhere from the surface to a kilometer below. In late 2018, the CSIRO’s RV Investigator was on an expedition to the Coral Sea Frontier. This has been happening over and over again as taxonomists sort through the things the ship brought back. Scientists say that number will probably go over 200 once the harder-to-classify creatures are fully studied. So far, more than 110 new fish and invertebrate species have been found in the Coral Sea alone. That’s not…

Under a few hundred meters of cold Atlantic water west of the Shetland Islands is one of the UK’s largest untapped oil and gas reserves. That spot hasn’t been drilled yet. Which brings us to the most politically charged question in British energy policy right now: will anyone ever? It’s called Rosebank Field. You can also find Jackdaw, a gas field off the coast of Aberdeenshire. These two projects have been used as stand-ins for a much bigger argument that has to do with climate science, energy bills, geopolitics, and now the first few days of a new prime minister’s…

It’s been hard to take your eyes off of Britain’s summer, and not always for the better. In southern England, lawns have turned a straw color. Greens on golf courses near Maidenhead are bright green, and the fairways are so dry that they’re almost yellow. People in Wisley, Surrey, didn’t get any rain for more than five weeks. That is not a heatwave fact. For fifteen days, you looked up at the sky and got nothing in return. There are some very interesting numbers behind all of this. Britain and Wales had only gotten 34% of their normal summer rainfall…