The way the ocean has been carrying out the planet’s dirty work has an odd quietness. The real story has been taking place somewhere far less photogenic, miles below the surface, in water that nearly no one will ever see, while the majority of the climate conversation focuses on wildfires, drought, and the temperature charts that flash across cable news. Despite the startling numbers, they hardly ever receive much attention from the general public. The ocean has absorbed about 91% of the extra heat that greenhouse gases have trapped. Not the atmosphere. Not the ground. the sea. The casualness with…
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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A team of researchers led by Zhetao Tan and colleagues published a scientific paper in Nature Climate Change in November 2025 that merits far more public attention than it has gotten. The study examined sixty years of ocean observations in four distinct categories: salinity shifts, warming, acidification, and deoxygenation. It posed a question that had been mostly ignored in earlier analyses: what happens when all of these changes happen simultaneously in the same location? As it happens, the result is much worse than what any one measurement had indicated. The researchers employed a framework known as “compound climatic impact-drivers,” and…
When scientists visited the western side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in 2007, an Ostracod—a tiny, barely noticeable crustacean known colloquially as a seed shrimp—was swarming in enormous numbers somewhere along the ridge in the complete darkness between Iceland and the Azores. They gathered samples. They sent them to specialists. It turned out that the creature might be a completely unidentified species. It had not yet been given a name. No one had even thought to search for it there. That moment encapsulates a fundamental aspect of the deep North Atlantic: an area so poorly understood that every expedition into it…
For millions of years, a slow and mostly undetectable process has been taking place off the southwest coast of Portugal, where the Atlantic deepens and the water takes on a specific dark blue hue that indicates great depth rather than just distance from shore. Here, the African and Eurasian plates are coming together and rubbing against one another along one of the world’s most intricate geological borders. On top of it is the Gulf of Cadiz. Furthermore, until recently, there weren’t enough tools available to study what was going on in the water column and below the seafloor to get…
Standing in front of a wall-mounted screen in a NOAA operations support center, watching a remotely operated camera glide through complete darkness hundreds of meters below the ocean’s surface, and realizing that you’re looking at a habitat that has existed for centuries without anyone ever seeing it, is a subtly unsettling experience. For years, NOAA’s deep-sea coral researchers have had to deal with this reality: a vast, mostly invisible world that keeps coming to light in unexpected ways. It’s hard to understand the numbers by themselves. In just two years, from 2018 to 2019, NOAA and its research partners identified…
The twilight zone of the ocean has a subtle unnerving quality. The layer between 200 and 1,000 meters below the surface is where sunlight fades into something more akin to a permanent grey dusk, rather than the striking darkness of the very deep. This area, known as the mesopelagic zone, has more living biomass than any other place in the ocean, as scientists have long known. They were unable to determine why big predators continued to appear there. Built for speed and surface hunting, great sharks were spending hours in this chilly, dark hallway. The total didn’t add up. The…
A 10-meter robot sinking by itself into complete darkness with no crew, no cable, and no real-time observers—just a pre-loaded route and the crushing weight of eight kilometers of water pressing in from all directions—is quietly amazing. As is typical of Japanese scientific press releases, JAMSTEC’s announcement in July that its unmanned deep-sea vehicle Urashima 8000 had reached 8,015.8 meters in the Izu–Ogasawara Trench was measured and technical. However, the number itself merits some attention. Last year, Japan’s operational map did not include that depth. Fundamentally, the Urashima 8000 is a rebuilt version of the original Urashima probe, which was…
A body of water the size of Ireland sitting essentially dead on the Baltic Sea floor has a subtly unsettling quality. No fish scuttling through the shadows. There are no crabs grazing the silt. Just bacteria, eating the last remnants of oxygen in once-lively water. This is not a scene from a science fiction book. It has been going on for decades and is getting worse every year with a slow-motion certainty that makes it easy to ignore until the fishing boats start returning empty. Since the middle of the 20th century, the number of hypoxic dead zones—areas of ocean…
When a tool that the scientific community has relied on for decades stops functioning as it should, a certain kind of unease spreads throughout the community. That’s about where oceanographers are now, observing how the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the enormous, sluggish heartbeat of the largest ocean in the world, behaves in ways that don’t fit the old playbook. For those who haven’t paid much attention to climate science, the PDO is a recurrent pattern of changes in ocean temperature throughout the North Pacific. It alternates between cool and warm phases, each lasting ten to forty years. Sea surface temperatures cool…
It’s difficult to get rid of the feeling that something permanent is subtly crumbling as you stand on the cliffs close to Scalby in Yorkshire on a chilly morning and watch the sea churn against the rock face below. For thousands of years, these cliffs have existed. However, Imperial College London researchers predict that they won’t look the same by 2100, and perhaps not even by 2030. Sandy beaches shift and erode, as oceanographers have long known. By now, that’s practically common knowledge. The increasing amount of evidence that even hard rock coastlines—the ones we take for granted—are starting to…