Author: Derrick Lester

The picture of NASA engineers crouching at the edge of a university swimming pool in Pasadena, California, with one of them holding a fishing rod attached to a 3D-printed plastic robot bobbing through the water below, has a subtly peculiar quality. A laptop, a pool, and a small machine that spells out “J-P-L” with its movements like a child bragging at a science fair—not a rocket launch, not a control room illuminated by mission screens. It sounds almost insignificant. It isn’t. The robot in that pool is a prototype for a NASA project called Sensing With Independent Micro-swimmers, or SWIM.…

During the war, the first hint was discovered. During World War II, sonar operators on U.S. Navy ships stared at their instruments, reading what appeared to be the ocean floor 300–500 meters below the surface. Everything was normal, but the seafloor continued to move. The men at the screens had no idea why it was deeper during the day and shallower at night. According to reports, some people claimed to have found submerged islands. They hadn’t. They were monitoring enormous, nearly unfathomable amounts of life. The Deep Scattering Layer, or DSL, is the new term for that phenomenon. This area…

There has never been anything particularly dramatic about the seafloor off the US East Coast. For a long time, the Atlantic margin was classified as passive—geologically stable and reasonably predictable—in contrast to the tectonically restless Pacific or the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico. In a way that few researchers expected, that assumption is now appearing dubious. Methane is seeping from the Atlantic Ocean floor at rates and locations that don’t neatly fit into current models, according to research conducted by Duke University scientists and their partners. At depths ranging from roughly 50 meters to 1,700 meters, more than 500 bubbling vents…

The concept has an almost paradoxical quality. The Arabian Gulf is surrounded by countries that struggle with water scarcity, and the ocean itself, drawn from depths most people never consider, is being suggested as a solution rather than a new dam, a rain-harvesting system, or another desalination plant bolted onto a coastline. In particular, Oman is getting ready to extract water from over 400 meters below the ocean’s surface, and the goal is more ambitious than it first seems. Once you sit with the fundamentals, they are actually fascinating. At those depths, deep ocean water is essentially sealed. The temperature…

The arrangement of things in the deep ocean by nature has an almost cruel quality. The most amazing animals, the ones that pulse with bioluminescent color, trail silk-like fins, and appear to be lit from within, are frequently the ones that have the highest chance of killing you. The design is so sophisticated that it seems deliberate. Consider the octopus with blue rings. It wears its electric blue rings like jewelry and is small enough to fit in your palm. However, those rings are not ornamental. They only show up as a final warning before the creature administers a dose…

The University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory has a sizable water tank. It doesn’t appear to be the birthplace of anything very important. Submerged equipment that is only partially visible beneath the surface, concrete walls, and industrial lighting. However, over a number of years, a small group of engineers worked in secret inside that tank to create something that would eventually catch the interest of governments across five continents. BluHaptics is the company. It originated from research conducted in the Department of Electrical Engineering at UW, particularly from the doctoral work of Fredrik Rydén, whose algorithms were initially created for…

The search that ensued after the Titan submersible lost contact with its support ship in June 2023 covered 13,000 square kilometers of the North Atlantic seafloor, which is about twice the size of Connecticut. It was 420 nautical miles to the closest port. It was necessary to ship in equipment. There was a running clock. The best course of action was still a slow, methodical sweep of the deep ocean, mostly in the dark, in the hopes that something would turn up, despite all the technology that humanity had at the time. Four days later, a remotely operated vehicle from…

Climate scientists began to notice something wasn’t quite adding up around 2003. The levels of greenhouse gases continued to rise. The sea level continued to rise. The ice continued to retreat. However, it appeared as though the planet had momentarily stopped warming as surface temperatures plateaued. As the climate debate grew louder, some pundits used that opportunity to raise concerns about the overall situation. They failed to take into consideration what was going on deep underwater, which at the time hardly anyone was taking into consideration. It turns out that the heat that the atmosphere was not displaying had been…

Many foreign ministry offices have a map that appears to be quite straightforward. About one-third of it is made up of the Pacific Ocean, which is dotted with tiny particles, some of which are hardly noticeable without a magnifying glass. Policymakers looked at those spots and moved on for decades. These days, entire departments work in those same offices to determine precisely what those specks desire. Pausing on that shift is worthwhile because it wasn’t an accident. In general, China was what changed. Beijing did more than simply knock on the door of the Pacific; it brought parliamentary buildings, police…

The size of the ships isn’t the first thing you notice when you stroll along the docks of any major port, such as Rotterdam, Singapore, or Shanghai. It’s the odor. The exhaust from ships burning some of the dirtiest fuel that is still lawfully sold anywhere in the world gives off that faint, lingering smell of heavy fuel oil that sticks to everything. Standing there, it’s easy to forget that over 80% of the world’s purchases and sales come by sea. Almost all of it was delivered by burning fossil fuels. That might be evolving. The maritime industry is reevaluating…