Author: Derrick Lester

The fact that the organization in charge of hurricane forecasts and fisheries management is also, inadvertently, one of the key players in maintaining the operation of America’s commercial shipping lanes seems almost paradoxical. However, that surprise quickly fades when you look at what NOAA’s unmanned systems actually accomplish. The majority of people view ocean data in the same way that they view weather data: as something hazily occurring in the background that is only important during a storm. The reality is much more complex. Every time a container ship carrying electronics, apparel, or food makes its way into a coastal…

The fact that NOAA chose Valentine’s Day to highlight the connection between weather data and ocean drones has a subtle poetic quality. It was neither a funding announcement nor a press conference. It was more akin to a summary of research, a lighthearted review of what has been successful, what is still being investigated, and what truly excites scientists. Beneath all the technical updates, there was something that strangely resembled a love story. It’s not very dramatic. It’s more akin to the slow, dependable type—two things that simply complement each other better. Saildrones are the name of the aforementioned ocean…

Seeing a fish float through water so dark and deep that sunlight has never touched it has a subtly humble quality. That is geography, not poetry. Most marine biologists dedicate their entire careers to gathering the kind of footage that scientists using remotely operated vehicles and submersibles captured in waters off Puerto Rico at depths exceeding 6,000 meters. There was more than just data returned. It was a window into a world that continues to astonish despite all of our ocean exploration. Under the direction of SUNY Geneseo researchers and with funding from NOAA Ocean Exploration, the study examined video…

Reading NOAA’s updates on North Atlantic right whales has a subtly depressing quality. They don’t read like reports on conservation. Each whale is given a number, sometimes a name, a last known location, and a list of injuries; they read like case files. The 5-year-old male whale #5192 was observed on June 8th with a fishing line trailing behind his flukes and sinking into the water column beneath him along the left side of his mouth. Two days later, researchers made another attempt to contact him in the vicinity of the Magdalen Islands. The weather was uncooperative. He’s still out…

Standing in, say, northern Wisconsin at eleven at night and watching green ribbons pulse across the sky has a subtle disorienting quality. Those who have never given geomagnetic storms much thought now find themselves murmuring. Phones emerge. Necks are a crane. Despite everyone’s best efforts, the internet is unable to fully capture this kind of moment. This week, the aurora borealis pushed abnormally far south, well beyond its usual territory near the Canadian border, creating that scene across twenty U.S. states. The geomagnetic activity had been closely monitored by NOAA, and their records provided a wealth of information. At level…

Imagining a nuclear reactor humming beneath a container ship in the middle of the Pacific, surrounded by piled boxes of running shoes and smartphone parts, has a subtle surreal quality. It sounds like a plot point from a thriller about the Cold War. However, if you walk into the right conference room in Oslo or Seoul right now, engineers, insurers, and classification societies—all of whom deal with probability rather than fantasy—will be discussing that image with all seriousness. It’s difficult to dispute the numbers that are driving this discussion. Approximately 350 million tonnes of fossil fuel are burned annually by…

A tiny golden blob sitting on the ocean floor two miles below the surface, with a hole punched through its center and adhered to a rock as if it had been placed there on purpose, has an almost unsettling quality. During NOAA’s Seascape Alaska 5 expedition in the Gulf of Alaska in 2023, the remotely operated vehicle Deep Discoverer came across exactly that, and for over two years, no one was able to identify it. Scientists who were watching the video in real time were genuinely unsure. Was it a case of eggs? A lifeless sponge? A microbial mat of…

Seeing a coral reef die has a subtle, devastating quality. It doesn’t occur with a roar or a crash. Like something that was once vibrant being erased, the color gradually fades and turns white. The experience of floating above a bleached reef, which is still structurally sound and architecturally stunning but somehow emptied out, is described by scientists who have dedicated their careers to diving these reefs. hollowed out. The fourth global coral bleaching event, which started in early 2023, is probably over as of mid-2025, according to NOAA, confirming what many in the marine science community had been anticipating.…

The way deep-sea mining is discussed in international policy forums and boardrooms is unsettling. The terminology is forward-thinking, bordering on clinical: “resource security,” “battery-grade minerals,” “the green transition.” The fact that no one fully understands what exists four kilometers below the ocean’s surface and that removing metal nodules from the seafloor could permanently destroy ecosystems that took millions of years to form are topics that are rarely discussed. The growing demand for cobalt, nickel, and manganese—metals necessary for solar panels and electric vehicle batteries—has contributed to the pressure to mine the deep sea for years. In contrast to terrestrial mining,…

Finding out that the sun, the same one that warms your coffee through the kitchen window, can covertly start destroying the power grid hours before anyone on Earth realizes it’s coming, is a bit disorienting. It turns out that this confusion is precisely the issue. An incoming geomagnetic disturbance was classified as a possible G4 or greater event in May by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. That’s serious by most standards. Grid engineers are extremely uncomfortable with the voltage instabilities and protective system misfires that a G4 brings. The G-scale runs from G1 to G5. However, the storm’s final intensity…