Author: Derrick Lester

The narrative of Odyssey Marine Exploration has an almost cinematic quality. For thirty years, the company dragged silver bars and gold coins from sunken ships that were thousands of feet below the surface. This was true treasure hunting, the kind that sounds too bizarre to be the business model of a publicly traded company. And yet here it is, now turning toward what is arguably far more valuable than cargo from the pirate era: rare earths, cobalt, copper, and phosphate lying on the Pacific seafloor, waiting to be retrieved by someone with the necessary tools and courage. The transition from…

Mining something you cannot see, touch, or even reach without a vehicle that costs millions of dollars to operate requires a certain kind of ambition. But that’s precisely what an increasing number of resource companies are trying to do: they’re sending technology into the ocean floor’s darkness in the hopes that what’s there could change how the world gets its essential minerals. The operation doesn’t resemble a traditional mine at all. No dust clouds, no boots on rock, no open pits. Instead, a ship is positioned somewhere over the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, scanning a seafloor four kilometers below with sonar. Geographic…

Typically, nothing unexpected happens in the sky over Connecticut. It’s raining. It is cloudy. It gets embarrassingly dark early in the winter. Therefore, most locals were unaware of what they were looking at or that they should have been looking at all when a faint green shimmer started to thread across the northern horizon on the evening of June 8. Connecticut was able to see the northern lights. Driven into view by a G3 geomagnetic storm that NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center had been monitoring for days, the aurora borealis arrived this far south quietly, momentarily, and without much fanfare.…

Sometimes you notice that a quiet worry has evolved into something completely different. Not quite a panic. It’s more akin to a group clearing of throats, with academics, scientists, and historians all focusing on the same issue at roughly the same time, during the same season, and with the same urgency in their voices. Over the past few months, deep-sea mining has been experiencing that. The Natural History Museum released what it described as the most thorough analysis of the potential effects of ocean-floor extraction on marine life to date. The cultural and ecological stakes were thoroughly investigated by Yale…

When something that climate scientists have spent their careers studying begins to move more quickly than their models predicted, a certain kind of uneasiness descends upon them. Sometime early this year, that feeling appears to have reached NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, and it hasn’t gone away. Recently, Nathaniel Johnson, a research meteorologist on NOAA’s El Niño forecasting team, described the ongoing shift in the Pacific Ocean as “One of the most rapid transitions that I’ve seen.” This is not a casual statement from someone who has been trained to speak carefully. Johnson has spent enough time observing these cycles to…

The fact that one of the ocean’s most legendary creatures—the giant squid, the subject of sailor nightmares and Jules Verne novels—was recently discovered lurking off the coast of Western Australia using nothing more dramatic than a few liters of seawater is subtly humbling. No tentacle sightings. No dramatic video. Just genetic murmurs drifting miles below the surface in chilly, dark water, waiting to be heard by someone with the proper equipment. The discovery resulted from a study conducted by Curtin University that examined two submarine canyons, Cape Range and Cloates, which are located about 1,200 kilometers north of Perth, close…

No one on the research team anticipated anything especially out of the ordinary when the remotely operated vehicle Deep Discoverer descended more than two miles into the Gulf of Alaska in 2023. Oddly shaped corals, strange fish, and alien-looking invertebrates clinging to rocks are just a few of the oddities that deep-sea expeditions frequently discover. When working on NOAA’s Okeanos Explorer, scientists become accustomed to the unexpected. However, that day’s footage from the ROV’s camera showed something different. At about 3,250 meters below the surface, a rounded, golden, mound-shaped object with a tiny hole in it rested on a rocky…

At their Aircraft Operations Center in Lakeland, Florida, which has a subtle jet fuel and radar equipment odor, NOAA officials gathered on a warm Thursday morning in late May to deliver what most people perceived as comforting news. They stated that a below-average Atlantic hurricane season is anticipated in 2026. fewer storms. calmer seas. There is a 55% chance that this year won’t be too bad. That’s for a reason. The term “below-average season” carries a sort of subtle deception, as anyone who follows hurricane science closely enough is aware. It explains quantity. About consequences, it says very little. According…

The pictures have an almost disorienting quality. At the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, more than three miles below the surface, dark, lumpy spheres, each about the size of a potato, rest on reddish-brown mud. They resemble something that grew rather than formed, almost biological in appearance. However, what NOAA discovered in mid-April from the seafloor off American Samoa is not biological. It’s geology, and more and more it’s geopolitics. Initially, the first pictures of polymetallic nodules from federal waters close to American Samoa arrived silently. Described as a scientific achievement from an ongoing hydrographic survey spanning more than 30,000…

A Lockheed Martin WP-3D turboprop known as “Miss Piggy” is flying somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico right into conditions that most aircraft spend their whole operational lives attempting to avoid. Equipment is thrown across the cabin by turbulence. It’s raining so much that it sounds like gravel striking the fuselage. Scientists are gathering the atmospheric data that goes into every hurricane forecast you’ve ever seen on TV somewhere in the middle of that mayhem. The planes served the purpose for decades. Less so is the surrounding communications infrastructure. That might be about to change. Earlier this month, SD Government,…