Something is shining on the deep ocean below, where sunlight has never reached and the water temperature remains close to freezing. Thousands of them all at once, at depths ranging from a few hundred to several thousand meters. Synchronous signals are flashed by lanternfish. Dinoflagellates that follow a current in the wake of a cold blue light. Luminescent clouds are released by shrimp to fool predators in utter darkness, with light from a single organism traveling across meters of otherwise dark water. For hundreds of millions of years, this has been the case. The temperature surrounding everything is changing, and…
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 survey team from Shell Oil was searching the Gulf of Mexico’s seafloor in 2011 for potential drilling locations. The image that their sonar produced didn’t resemble geology. It was almost three-quarters of a mile underwater, measuring around 84 feet long by 26 feet wide, a configuration that no natural creation could have. Shell had a legal obligation to inform federal authorities. Investigators would later determine that what they had discovered was a copper-clad early nineteenth-century sailing ship that most likely sank in the same storm as two other ships discovered within five miles of it. The Monterrey Shipwreck, as…
There are fields of black boulders about the size of potatoes in the abyssal plain between Hawaii and Mexico, four kilometers below the Pacific Ocean’s surface, in almost complete darkness. They have been accumulating manganese, cobalt, nickel, and copper from the sluggish chemistry of the deep water for millions of years. They have never been mined for profit. The regulatory authorities tasked with overseeing that process are currently finding it difficult to keep up with the increasing number of businesses and governments attempting to modify that as soon as feasible. Land is where the urgency originates. About 70% of the…
A significant amount of this nation’s financial transactions, diplomatic communications, and internet traffic are currently carried by a fiber-optic cable about the thickness of a garden hose that is currently laying on the Atlantic Ocean floor. It is so near the seafloor that it can be severed by a ship’s anchor if it is tugged at the incorrect angle in the wrong location. Until the outage reports began to come in, no one standing above the water would be aware that anything had occurred. This isn’t speculative. Since late 2024, at least eight such cable cutting have happened in the…
Imagine a fifty-story-tall turbine anchored to the ocean floor by cables the thickness of a tiny vehicle, rather than on a concrete pile pushed into the ocean floor. In the swells, it sways a little. It is more expensive per megawatt than nearly everything that has been constructed by mankind to produce electricity. Additionally, the industry that is betting on it is currently working in secret to determine whether it will ever be sufficiently affordable to be significant. In the energy transition, floating offshore wind is in a rather uncomfortable situation. The finest winds in the world blow over deep…
Sea surface temperature maps are not the most important ones at a NOAA operations center during an intense El Niño event. The vivid red patches that are visible enough to be replicated in news articles and weather broadcasts as they travel across the equatorial Pacific in satellite images are the ones that receive media attention. The cross-sections of the equatorial Pacific at depth, color-coded by temperature anomaly, illustrate where heat has accumulated in the water column in comparison to historical averages. These maps are what oceanographers pay closer attention to. These maps currently depict something that hasn’t been seen in…
A deep-sea researcher is requested to complete a piece of a grant application that calls for a statement of the societal impact of her work in a conference room in the geology department someplace in central Europe. She investigates the microbial populations found in sediment cores that are taken from several kilometers below the ocean’s surface. The microorganisms are fascinating. They are new in terms of metabolism. Understanding how life endures under harsh conditions—possibly even on other planets—may be affected by them. It’s more difficult than the science, though, to write it on a funding form in a way that…
Samples that had been locked in the seafloor for 101.5 million years were unsealed by scientists in a Japanese laboratory using sediment cores taken from beneath the South Pacific and supplemented with nutrients. The International Ocean Discovery Program recovered the pale, fine-grained clay sediment from an area of the ocean so devoid of nutrients that very little reaches the seafloor to break down. Researchers then watched to see what transpired. Something began to grow in a few of weeks. Up to 99 percent of the microorganisms they had retrieved from the oldest layers—bacteria that had been resting in the dark…
Ocean color satellites have been providing scientists with the same fundamental information for around thirty years: the ocean’s level of greenery. Green stands for phytoplankton, which are microscopic organisms that resemble plants and produce oxygen, fix carbon, and constitute the foundation of the marine food chain through photosynthesis at the ocean’s surface. In general, more green indicates more phytoplankton. Less green equates to less. Sensors that detected ocean reflectance in a few distinct color bands and used those observations to estimate chlorophyll content, such as SeaWiFS (launched in 1997) and MODIS (launched in 1999), provided that signal. The information was…
Every national climate strategy and net-zero pledge is based on the carbon budget, which is predicated on the rarely expressed premise that the ocean will continue to behave as it has. year after year, absorbing about 25% of humanity’s annual carbon dioxide emissions, acting as a buffer that has significantly reduced the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere. What happens to that assumption under high-emission scenarios is examined in the latest modeling work from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and the results are unsettling. According to the findings, if emissions remain on a high trajectory, the ocean’s carbon sink may…