On a chilly February morning in 2026, biologists discovered a three-year-old female right whale washed up on the sand at a beach on Virginia’s eastern shore. She was a whale named Porcia’s 2023 calf. She was supposed to have decades ahead of her. Rather, she became the 43rd confirmed death in a crisis that has persisted for nine years with no end in sight. In 2017, NOAA Fisheries declared the North Atlantic Right Whale Unusual Mortality Event. The term “unusual” suggested something transient, such as a spike, an anomaly, or a crisis that would be investigated by agencies before being…
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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On a Tuesday morning in late May, meteorologists convened at NOAA’s Aircraft Operations Center in Lakeland, Florida, a location that has a subtle jet fuel and weather map odor, to deliver what appeared to be generally positive news. They predicted that the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season would probably be below average. fewer storms with names. fewer hurricanes. There is a 55% chance that this season will fall into the “below normal” category. The figures must have felt like a tiny exhale to coastal communities still processing memories of previous destruction. The World Meteorological Organization swiftly endorsed the assessment and amplified…
Somewhere off the coast of Western Australia, hundreds of meters below the surface of the Indian Ocean, there is a certain kind of silence. Not a wave. There is no wind. Just darkness, pressure, and more and more the hum of machines that no one is operating. Although the transition from human divers and tethered equipment to fully autonomous underwater systems has been developing for years, there has been a noticeable change over the past five years. People in the industry still discuss the capability jump with a hint of skepticism because it has been so steep. The chief technology…
When you first learn about OWLS, it seems almost unrealistically ambitious. The work of several dozen laboratory scientists can be performed by eight automated instruments combined into a single system. These instruments can track microscopic movement in real time, analyze liquid samples, and search for the chemical fingerprints of life. It was created by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory with a single, somewhat startling goal in mind: to examine ice fragments that were erupting from Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which is about a billion miles away from the closest repair facility. However, while traveling to the outer solar system, an intriguing event…
The race to mine the deep sea has a subtle unsettling quality. It’s not visible to you. No visible scars on a hillside, no protests outside a mine entrance. All of this is happening thousands of meters below the surface, in complete darkness, and under intense pressure, and that invisibility might be the exact issue. In an effort to create the most comprehensive understanding of the potential effects of deep-sea mining on marine life, a recent review headed by Professor Adrian Glover of the Natural History Museum in London has examined more than 200 published and unpublished reports covering more…
The fact that the system that alerts millions of Americans to tornadoes, flash floods, and potentially fatal storms was initially developed at the same time that people were still learning how to use dial-up internet is particularly ironic. Since the 1990s, the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System, or AWIPS, has served as the foundation of the National Weather Service. In general, it has been successful. However, being adequate and working are two different things, and for the forecasters who depend on it on a daily basis, the difference has gotten bigger every year. That is now changing. Contracts to completely…
The idea of a platform the height of a forty-story building, sitting in almost complete darkness more than a kilometer below the South China Sea, extracting natural gas from rock formations that no human hand will ever physically touch has an almost cinematic quality. That is the reality of Shenhai Yihao in China, which is now fully operational following years of development, testing, and a highly visible Phase I debut back in 2021. With proven geological reserves now confirmed at over 150 billion cubic meters, the field has reached its intended production capacity of 4.5 billion cubic meters of natural…
When the forecast maps are released and no one has anything comforting to say, a certain kind of quiet dread descends upon agricultural communities. Parts of Ohio seem to be experiencing that emotion at the moment. The majority of the United States faces higher-than-even chances of a warmer-than-average summer, according to NOAA’s most recent seasonal outlook, which was made public by the Climate Prediction Center. Ohio, which is still dealing with the aftermath of last year’s historic drought, is closely monitoring every contour line on those maps. By all standards, the summer of 2024 was shocking. For the first time…
A picture of a construction crew somewhere deep underground, knee-deep in water that shouldn’t be there, staring at a stationary tunnel boring machine is one that you can practically picture without actually seeing it. This isn’t speculative. Something very similar occurred in Sri Lanka for almost ten years on a project now known as the Uma Oya Multipurpose Development Project, costing hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency engineering, lost energy revenue, and delays. Water was not meant to consume the tunnel; rather, it was meant to transport it. A USD 514 million EPC contract was approved for the 15.3-kilometer…
Every shift, a small team of forecasters watches the Sun somewhere in Boulder, Colorado, in a building that would go unnoticed. Not in a symbolic sense. Tracking eruptions, magnetic shifts, and billion-ton clouds of plasma that occasionally hurtle toward Earth at speeds that make most natural phenomena seem courteous is literally watching it. The Space Weather Prediction Center of NOAA owns the building, and what takes place within is far more significant than most people realize. The topic of space weather is not something that is discussed over dinner. It doesn’t receive the breathless coverage of a wildfire or hurricane…