Author: Derrick Lester

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…

In late May, the quiet before hurricane season officially begins, when grocery stores covertly replenish bottled water shelves and residents begin to eye their roof tarps, a certain kind of dread descends on coastal towns. Along the Gulf Coast, that sentiment has always been present. However, it has a heavier burden this year. NOAA’s data is hard to ignore, and the message is clear: the window of opportunity to prepare is closing more quickly than most people realize, the ocean is getting warmer, and storms are getting stronger. In the Gulf, hurricanes are nothing new. Flooding isn’t either. However, what…

At the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, something almost paradoxical is taking place. Businesses vying to extract polymetallic nodules from the seafloor have spent years, sometimes more than ten years, gathering what they claim are the most extensive environmental datasets ever put together for any deep-ocean industrial operation. thousands of photos of the seafloor. Oceanographic monitoring is ongoing. The majority of marine biologists have never reached the depths where net samples were taken. It’s truly impressive work based just on the numbers. However, the scientific community, environmental groups, and an increasing number of government regulators continue to have serious doubts.…

A federal map shows that about 62,000 square miles of ocean off the Northeast coast are seasonally off-limits to traditional lobster fishing. The cause is straightforward and excruciating: for decades, North Atlantic right whales have been silently strangled by the vertical ropes that connect surface buoys to seafloor traps. Over 85% of the species have entanglement-related scars. When a line is first wrapped around their bodies, some whales manage to survive. Before they pass away from their injuries, others drag hundreds of pounds of equipment through the water for months. Aerial survey crews captured a young female right whale (catalog…

If you’ve ever stood at the ocean’s edge at night, there comes a time when it doesn’t feel familiar. A few feet out, the water turns dark. The sound turns into something that predates language. And it dawns on you, perhaps for the first time, that you truly don’t know what’s going on below the surface—not a hundred feet, not a mile, and most definitely not below a thousand meters, where sunlight completely disappears and pressure turns into a physical force that could instantly crush a human body. For a long time, NOAA has been reflecting on that ignorant moment.…

One of the most talked-about infrastructure projects in southwest Nigeria was put on hold for two years—not due to a lack of funding, investors leaving, or a withdrawal of support from the federal government. A much more embarrassing issue caused the Ondo Deep Seaport, a vast project spanning 2,771 hectares of Ilaje coastline, to stall: a name that shouldn’t have been on a government license. Speaking at a press conference prior to his inauguration, Governor Lucky Aiyedatiwa publicly confirmed it over the weekend. The implications that lay beneath his calm, almost subdued explanation were anything but. Whoever handled the paperwork…