More people have set foot on the moon than have descended to the ocean floor. That fact has been stated so often that it is on the verge of becoming background noise, but if you take a moment to consider what is actually happening in subsea robotics at the moment, it becomes truly bizarre. No human eye has ever seen entire cave systems beneath the ocean’s surface. not only partially investigated. Not roughly mapped. Just unidentified. This is beginning to change, and the machines that are making the changes sometimes resemble fish remarkably. The engineering technique known as “biomimicry,” which…
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.
Read More
What’s going on in Puget Sound is almost cruel. The water has the same appearance. The tides continue to come and go. However, a subtle and unnoticeable change has occurred in the chemistry, and the shellfish farmers who have worked these waters for generations are only now starting to realize how significant this change is. Fundamentally, ocean acidification is fairly simple. The ocean absorbs about 25% of the carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere when fossil fuels are burned. This absorption sets off a chemical reaction that lowers the pH of the water and produces carbonic acid. Already,…
A picture of staghorn and fire coral taken in July 2023 off Key Largo, bleached white against the blue water, is making the rounds among marine scientists. Skeletal and stark. It appears to have been dead for a very long time. Two weeks prior to the photo being taken, it was still alive. You can learn more about what’s going on in the Florida Keys from that picture, which was taken by University of Miami researchers, than most press releases will acknowledge. The third-largest barrier reef system in the world, the Great Florida Reef, is dying. not decreasing on a…
Watching the Arctic melt and witnessing the governments’ and energy companies’ quick response—calculation rather than alarm—is unsettling. A new type of discussion about who gets there first and how much is underneath has been taking place in boardrooms and foreign ministries as sea ice retreats at a rate that scientists describe as historically unprecedented. The figures are truly astounding. According to estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey, the Arctic contains about 22% of the world’s undiscovered natural gas and oil reserves. That amounts to about 412 billion barrels of oil equivalent, which is more than twice Kuwait’s known reserves. It…
Arriving at a Caribbean beach only to discover it buried beneath a wall of brown, sulfur-smelling seaweed is a certain kind of misery. The rotten-egg smell that permeates thick mats of sargassum piled along the waterline, sometimes extending for miles, reaches you before you see it. Communities in the Caribbean and along the Gulf of Mexico now perceive this as a seasonal calamity rather than an occasional annoyance. Sargassum blooms have become much more difficult to ignore since about 2011. One of the biggest brown algae masses ever seen crossed the Atlantic in 2023, spanning more than 5,000 miles. Once…
On June 12, 2026, SpaceX priced its shares at $135 apiece, accomplishing something that only a few years prior had seemed nearly unthinkable. In a single offering, the company raised $85.7 billion, almost three times as much as Saudi Aramco did when it went public in 2019. The time had finally come for a generation of ordinary investors who had watched SpaceX from the sidelines and wondered if they would ever get a chance to own a piece of it. Where to actually purchase those shares is now the practical question. SpaceX is traded under the ticker SPCX on the…
The response to SpaceX’s eventual June 2026 IPO was akin to a moon launch and a meme stock frenzy. Elon Musk became the first trillionaire in history in a matter of hours after shares opened at $150, significantly higher than the $135 IPO price. That afternoon, there was an odd sensation outside the Nasdaq that was similar to euphoria but not quite. The kind of electric buzz that prompts people who would otherwise be cautious to grab their brokerage apps. That enthusiasm makes sense. In all honesty, SpaceX is a truly amazing company. Over 80% of the world’s mass delivered…
The weather in Chicago has always been personal. It sometimes offers something so surprisingly pleasant that even longtime residents look up from their phones and pay attention, but it also arrives with an attitude and changes without warning. The city is currently experiencing one of those infrequent, pleasant periods in late July 2026, with low-to-mid-70s Fahrenheit temperatures, mostly sunny skies, and humidity that has been reduced just enough to make spending an afternoon outside seem like a sensible decision rather than a minor hassle. A northeast wind kept the weather near the lake comfortable as Wednesday morning began with mostly…
Every year around the end of May, a specific type of British denial takes hold. When the temperature rises above 25 degrees Celsius, people check the forecast, plan barbecues in secret, and don’t say much about it—as if speaking out loud about the warmth would frighten it away. That ritual seems almost charming this summer. June didn’t show up quietly. The final temperature was 37.7C. Even prepared observers were shocked by what actually happened, even though the UK weather forecast had been tracking the June heatwave for days prior to its peak. Southern England saw temperatures rise to 38°C, with…
Some people check the radar first thing in the morning before checking their messages. Many of them ended up following the same account in Illinois. The Paxton-based Illinois Storm Chasers, LLC. has discreetly created something that lacks a clean category. It’s not a government organization. It’s not a weather desk on television. However, it serves as one of the more dependable weather resources in the state thanks to its nearly 450,000 Facebook followers and real-time warning updates that are sent out faster than most people can refresh their news apps. It’s important to pay attention to that. When storm season…