Author: Derrick Lester

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…

Twenty sizable ocean floor craters in the western Pacific are encircled by structures known as pipe swarms, which are passageways through the rock that allow superheated fluids to rise from below, on a section of seafloor located on the Caroline Plate about 80 kilometers from the edge of the Mussau Trench. Eleven square kilometers make up the whole system. Squat lobsters, shrimp, and anemones swim about the vent ports under the lights of the Fendouzhe submersible, feeding on bacteria that use hydrogen chemistry instead of sunlight. Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences described the place and published their findings…

The carbon budget, an estimate of how much CO2 humanity may still produce before the atmosphere heats beyond a certain threshold, is the figure at the heart of all climate targets, nationally decided contributions, and net-zero pledges. Models are the foundation of that figure. These models make assumptions about how the ocean functions as a carbon sink, including how much of the carbon emitted by humans is absorbed by seawater, how this absorption rate varies as the ocean warms, and how various biological and chemical processes in the water column influence how long the carbon remains sequestered once it enters…

A study ship has been testing the effects of changing the alkalinity of a tiny area of saltwater somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, around 40 miles off the coast of Oregon. The theory goes back to fundamental physical oceanography and is based on the fact that more alkaline ocean water absorbs more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. What happens to the zooplankton, phytoplankton, fish larvae, shellfish, and the larger ecosystem that inhabits and travels across that area of ocean when the water is altered in this way is the practical question. The researchers are making a thorough effort to learn.…

Over the past two years, there has been a noticeable shift in the framing surrounding ocean carbon removal in a Senate hearing room in Washington. The technology used to be mostly discussed in scientific literature and specialized environmental circles. It is a category of methods that includes everything from adding alkaline minerals to seawater to growing enormous amounts of macroalgae to improving the ocean’s natural carbon uptake through various chemical and biological interventions. It increasingly appears in the same rooms as offshore investment, fishery management, and energy policy. The most tangible legislative effort to date to establish a federal framework…

Fish are shaped by the shape of the ocean floor. That isn’t a scientific claim, but it sums up what an Ohio State team discovered when they examined almost 3,000 deep-sea fish species and charted how their bodies have evolved over time. After analyzing data on 2,882 species and publishing their findings in the journal Evolution, the researchers discovered a pattern that is cleaner than most evolutionary studies are able to produce: fish that inhabit ocean basins that have been isolated from one another for millions of years consistently arrive at the same body design. Convergent evolution is the term…