A calm hurricane season has a subtle unnerving quality. Communities in Florida, Louisiana, and Georgia that have spent decades rebuilding after Katrina, Irma, and Ian typically react with something akin to relief when meteorologists declare that El Niño is controlling Atlantic storm activity. However, that feeling of security is based on a partial image. Because El Niño tends to return what it takes away from the Atlantic—sometimes violently—somewhere else. For those who haven’t kept up with its rhythms, El Niño is a rise in sea surface temperatures in the eastern and central equatorial Pacific. Its fingerprints appear in weather systems…
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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Pouring €25 million into a location that is never exposed to sunlight has a subtly bold quality. There are no cameras following you down there. The terrain is not captured by any satellite image. However, France has determined that the ocean floor, particularly everything below 1,000 meters, merits the same significant investment that the world typically sets aside for semiconductor factories and aerospace programs. From the outside, at least, it seems like an oddly brave wager that is also long overdue. The money is provided by France’s larger France 2030 initiative, a comprehensive €54 billion plan to revitalize the nation’s…
The fact that we know more about the surface of Mars than we do about the bottom of our own oceans is subtly amazing. This summer, a 28-day expedition aboard NOAA’s research vessel Okeanos Explorer is taking action to address this fact, which may sound like the kind of statistic someone says at a dinner party to sound intriguing. Starting in July 2026, the Cook Islands Seabed Minerals Authority and NOAA Ocean Exploration will venture into deep Pacific waters that have simply never been thoroughly examined. not accurately mapped in the modern era. not included in the sample. not captured…
The ocean and sky cease to be distinct entities at some point during a category 4 hurricane. The surface is torn into spray by the wind. Waves rise to heights of thirty or forty feet. Humans don’t belong there. Nevertheless, something went there last summer: a small, wind-powered drone known as a Saildrone Explorer sailed straight into Hurricane Sam’s eye, sending live footage from a spot where no camera had ever been before. The footage was more than just dramatic; it was raw and churning. It was unprecedented in science. That mission was not an accident. It resulted from a…
Reading the FAO’s conclusions on deep-sea fisheries management has a subtly unsettling quality. It’s not because the language is frightening. In certain places, the report reads like a meticulous, exacting academic exercise. However, a more unsettling picture emerges between the lines: the high seas, which have long been regarded as the uncharted territory of international law, are actually better managed than the ocean floor beneath them. That is not a guarantee. An indictment, that is. There is life in the deep sea. It is dynamic, unpredictable, and fragile in ways that surface fisheries just aren’t, which often surprises people. Weather-driven…
The idea of scientific instruments positioned 2,800 meters below the North Atlantic, designed to endure corrosive saltwater and crushing pressure, and yet destroyed by a Washington-written policy document, is quietly devastating. In 2016, the $370 million Ocean Observatories Initiative network of seafloor sensors, underwater gliders, and moored surface platforms went into full operation. It was intended to operate continuously for 25 years, providing researchers, fisheries managers, weather forecasters, and policymakers worldwide with real-time data. The initiative’s marine meteorologist, Jim Edson, referred to it as “the world’s most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems.” It wasn’t a boastful description. It was…
A 35-foot whale washing up dead on a beach in New York has a subtly unsettling quality. The joggers, the harbor cranes, and the far-off skyline don’t fit the background. Nevertheless, it continued to occur. Minke whales were repeatedly found dead on beaches from Maine to South Carolina, recorded in databases, and photographed by researchers in red-vested uniforms standing over massive pale carcasses in the sand. 28 confirmed deaths had been reported along the East Coast in less than a year by the time NOAA Fisheries formally declared a “unusual mortality event,” which is more than twice the historical annual…
A sky that shouldn’t look the way it does has a subtle unnerving quality. On the evening of June 4th, people pulled over on the side of the road outside of Columbus, their phones raised and their necks craned, gazing at green and violet ribbons that hung above the tree line as if they had no right to be there. This was not Iceland. It was Ohio. Two days prior, on June 2nd, a sunspot caused the event that resulted in those lights. Not any sunspot, mind you. After days of tightening magnetic field lines, Sunspot 4455, a dark, restless…
Something strange has been going on this week in a quiet area of Hagerstown Regional Airport. The Rider Jet Center, the airport’s fixed base operator, is home to a research aircraft manned by a group of federal scientists who aren’t here by accident. The aircraft is located beyond the regular arrivals and the bustle of small charter traffic. They are here because the air above this city in mid-Maryland, which is conveniently close to Washington, D.C., turns out to be just what they need. For the better part of the week, the team from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric…
The image is almost surreal: a huge machine vacuuming up lumpy dark nodules that took millions of years to form, crawling slowly across the pitch-black ocean floor more than two miles below the surface. It’s not science fiction. In the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a region of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Mexico, The Metals Company is actively proposing to do just that. Additionally, the U.S. government has determined that it is prepared to proceed immediately rather than waiting for the rest of the world to reach a consensus on how this should operate. The United States has essentially left the…