Author: Derrick Lester

When you stand on Stonington’s dock early in July, you can see the weathered boats leaving the harbor before most people have had their first cup of coffee. The bait is inserted, the trap lines are lowered, and somewhere beneath the greenish-gray water, Maine’s most valuable animal travels along the ocean floor, oblivious to its surroundings. The lobster is unable to detect the warming of the surrounding water. But for years, the lobstermen have been aware of this. Approximately 99 percent of the world’s oceans are not warming as quickly as the Gulf of Maine. That is a documented trend…

Observing the ocean’s color change has a subtle, unsettling quality. It wasn’t a dramatic overnight change, nor was it particularly noticeable. Instruments orbiting hundreds of kilometers above the water record the slow process, which is measured in light wavelengths. Nevertheless, Stephanie Dutkiewicz at MIT did not feel relieved to be proven correct when she examined what the satellites had been telling her for years. She described it as frightening. Approximately 36% of the world’s open ocean, or an area close to 122 million square kilometers, has seen discernible color changes, according to data collected between 1998 and 2022. What was…

A colony of Porites lobata coral was quietly building itself, ring by ring, year by year, and absorbing the chemistry of the surrounding water off the northeastern tip of the Philippines, close to the point where the Kuroshio Current bends westward and presses into the South China Sea. No one was observing. No one was taking measurements. However, the record was being maintained. Because of this, the results that were published in Science Advances last February seem to be more than just a significant scientific achievement. The ocean seems to have finally given up its own journal. Drilling a core…

There is something quietly unsettling about the fact that between 30 and 60 percent of marine life has never been formally described by science. Not because the animals don’t exist — they do, in extraordinary numbers — but because getting to them, collecting them intact, and transporting their fragile bodies to the surface has always been the problem. The deep ocean is not cooperative. It is cold, pressurized, and dark, and the things that live there are often so delicate that the act of collecting them destroys precisely what you were trying to study. That tension has sat at the…

The idea that a supply of metals that the modern world sorely needs is hidden beneath thousands of meters of icy, dark water, somewhere beneath any nation’s reach or claim, has an almost mythological quality. copper, nickel, manganese, and cobalt. Everyone keeps promising the green transition, renewable infrastructure, and the raw materials used to make electric batteries. It sounds like a fabrication to support a bold wager. And it is in a lot of ways. The current state of deep-sea mining is peculiar. For years, the UN-established International Seabed Authority, which is in charge of overseeing what is legally referred…

The discovery of PCBs at a depth of almost eleven thousand meters below the ocean’s surface is extremely unsettling. Legally, structurally, and institutionally unsettling in a way that the environmental law community has only just started to address, rather than philosophically unsettling, though that is also the case. In June 2017, Chinese researchers on board the R/V Tansuo Yihao collected sediment samples from the southern Mariana Trench without the intention of engaging in a legal dispute. However, that’s basically what they discovered. The polychlorinated biphenyl concentrations found in those samples, which ranged from 931 to more than 4,000 picograms per…

The science ceases to feel abstract at a certain point, somewhere between the hum of the ship and the icy quiet of deep water. The meticulous process of mapping the Mariana Trench has been compared to “mowing the lawn” by James Gardner, a research professor at the University of New Hampshire’s Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping. One meticulous strip at a time, overlapping sonar tracks are laid across thousands of square kilometers of seafloor. It sounds almost normal. It is not at all like that. Near Guam, the Mariana Trench is located about seven miles below the surface of…

The thought that millions of years of animal life have been developing on the ocean floor—whole migrations, entire generations, evolutionary journeys of astounding distance—and we have virtually no knowledge of it is almost unsettling. Not because researchers weren’t searching. However, searching the deep ocean is actually one of the most difficult tasks that people have ever attempted. Few people outside of the marine science community seem to have noticed that this is starting to change. For the past two years, researchers working in isolated areas of the U.S. Pacific have been gathering seawater and extracting species from it—a task that…

Standing at the ocean’s edge and knowing that the world’s largest heat store is located just beneath its shimmering surface—quiet, ancient, and uncaring—is almost unsettling. You can’t tap a battery. It is not a drainable reservoir. Just energy trapped in water, growing silently for decades, and now, in 2025, reaching a point that has truly unnerved researchers. The figures from the international ocean study this year don’t quite make sense. The world’s oceans absorbed 23 zettajoules of heat in 2025 alone. That’s 23 followed by 21 zeroes, or about 37 years of all the energy that humans currently consume in…

The notion that the solution to one of the dirtiest issues in technology may be hidden at the bottom of the ocean has an almost poetic quality. Between 240 and 340 terawatt hours of electricity are used annually by data centers, those enormous, humming warehouses that power everything from hospital diagnostic software to your morning Spotify playlist. It’s not a rounding error. That’s about the yearly energy consumption of a number of mid-sized nations, and a large portion of it is used for one routine but costly task: keeping machines cool. Engineers were therefore keeping a close eye on Microsoft…