Author: Derrick Lester

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…

It starts out pretty quiet. Springfield, Missouri’s air temperature is a comfortable 21 degrees Celsius at 1:00 in the morning. The sky is partly cloudy, and there is a light southeast wind that not many people can feel. It’s almost possible to tell yourself that the worst is over. But people who have lived in this city for a summer know not to trust the early hours. The weather in Springfield has never been able to make up its mind. Today, in July, the cool air from the morning gives way to temperatures in the mid- to upper-30s Celsius by…

There’s something almost deceptive about Springfield in the late summer afternoon. It’s easy to breathe. Inside, it stays in the low 80s. A few more clouds come in from the west and make the sun a little softer. This makes you feel like the worst of summer might be over. It’s not. This week, Ron Hearst, the chief meteorologist for KY3 Weather, made that very clear. In the Ozarks, there was one more nice day. Then it gets hot again very quickly. By Sunday, it’s going to be close to 100 degrees outside. This is what the air really feels…

A tiny worm lives unhindered by bacteria somewhere on the Pacific Ocean floor in nearly freezing water under pressure strong enough to destroy most life. It’s not a coincidence. Researchers have long suspected that some of the planet’s harshest habitats, where sunlight never reaches and temperatures are barely above freezing, are secretly creating chemistry that may save lives. A growing amount of evidence now indicates that they were correct. For decades, the pipeline of antibiotics has essentially stalled. Since 1980, only two truly novel classes of antibiotics have been approved, and the bugs are quickly catching up. Globally, antimicrobial resistance…

A creature that glows to survive—not to be seen, but specifically to destroy—has a subtly unsettling quality. The Mariana Trench, located miles below the Pacific where sunlight completely disappears and pressure is measured in tons rather than pounds, is engaged in its own arms race. No noise, no bullets. Just light, used with icy accuracy. In April 2016, NOAA’s research ship Okeanos Explorer sent its remotely operated vehicle Deep Discoverer down close to the Enigma Seamount, and the footage it returned was truly bizarre. There, roughly 2.3 miles below the surface, a red-and-yellow jellyfish that science had never seen before…

The ocean has a layer that acts like a whispering corridor. Depending on where you are in the world, it is located about 3,000 feet below the surface, and sound can do almost unbelievable things there. It moves. Thousands of them, not just a few miles, bounced between the pressure boundary below and the thermal ceiling above, moving forward like a hand-to-hand message across a pitch-black room. It is referred to by scientists as the SOFAR channel or the Deep Sound Channel. The U.S. Navy was highly interested in it during the Cold War. Originally intended to detect Soviet submarines,…