At Darwin Island, one of the world’s most isolated dive sites, about 600 miles off the coast of mainland Ecuador, something subtly remarkable is taking place. Three times a day, a team of researchers descends on a scuba dive, lands on a platform made of submerged rock, and waits. They are pulled by powerful currents. Visibility changes. Then, out of nowhere, a 12-meter whale shark appears out of nowhere. It is massive, leisurely, and doesn’t seem to realize how uncommon it is. It’s not just awe that follows. Science is involved. In particular, it’s a photograph, and it might be…
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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When the topic of Arctic drilling comes up again, a certain silence falls over the conversation. A pause. a slight tightening of the eye area. Those who witnessed the Kulluk run aground on live television in December 2012 after its towline snapped in choppy Alaskan water, and who witnessed Shell spend seven billion dollars and come away empty-handed, often carry that memory with them. The oil industry has a tendency to appear overconfident in the Arctic. And yet, here we are once more. Once again, oil companies are pushing into waters at the northern edge of Alaska’s already heavily industrialized…
The idea of vast, frigid Alaskan waters, kelp swaying in the current, and oyster beds silently growing beneath fishing boats that have worked those same stretches of ocean for generations has an almost cinematic quality. An atlas identifying 77 sites in the Gulf of Alaska that might be appropriate for commercial shellfish and seaweed aquaculture was recently released by NOAA Fisheries. It seems like a wise policy on paper. It sounds more complicated than that on the docks. Technically speaking, the atlas is a planning document rather than a final designation. It was created by NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal…
This story has an almost cyclical quality that, if you’ve been watching it long enough, is almost predictable. Approximately 130 miles off Cape Cod, the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument is a 5,000-square-mile stretch of the Atlantic that has been opened, closed, and reopened to commercial fishing based almost entirely on the political party in power. The National Marine Fisheries Service of NOAA formally repealed the rule that prohibited commercial fishing in those waters last month, bringing federal regulations into compliance with President Trump’s executive proclamation ordering the agency to reopen the monument. It was a long-needed validation…
The April 2026 global temperature report from NOAA contains a figure that is likely overlooked. This April was the 50th consecutive April with a global temperature departure above the 20th-century average, which is a more subdued statistic than the headline figure—the fourth-warmest April on record, the 1.12°C anomaly above the 20th-century baseline. The last April that was below average was in 1976. That is no longer a streak. The majority of people haven’t fully realized the implications of this new normal, which has been in place for almost fifty years. The global surface temperature in April 2026 was 2.02°F (1.12°C)…
Witnessing the gradual disappearance of something ancient evokes a certain kind of dread. For hundreds of millions of years, coral reefs have endured ice ages, asteroid winters, and seas that have risen and fallen more times than anyone can remember. However, at some point in early 2023, the ocean’s temperature rose to a point where those reefs were unable to survive. The fourth global mass coral bleaching event in recorded history ensued, and even though scientists think it is over, the word “over” seems overly optimistic. After months of monitoring following the severe bleaching episode off Western Australia earlier that…
The idea that you can raise a bottle of seawater from 600 meters below the surface and discover evidence of creatures you have never once seen through a camera lens is subtly amazing. No video. No tangible sample. Just bits of genetic material floating like biological confetti in the chilly darkness. That’s what environmental DNA is all about, and NOAA recently made a lot of it public. In collaboration with the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Northern Gulf Institute, and NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, NOAA Ocean Exploration published its first publicly available eDNA datasets in April.…
Somewhere in the deep Pacific, a ship is working on projects that most Americans will never learn about, at least not just yet. A SpaceX launch garnered more media attention than the NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer. On social media, it doesn’t become popular. However, the information it is surreptitiously gathering from the ocean floor, miles below the surface, may have a greater impact on the US economy than nearly anything currently taking place in a government office. The mission is a component of a broader federal initiative linked to President Trump’s Executive Order 14285, which instructs agencies to map and…
The ocean has a way of giving you the impression that there are still mysteries in the world. Not abstract ones, but actual, tangible, massive secrets that, if you look at the right time, are sitting right there in the water. That’s essentially what happened in 2025 when a NOAA research team carrying out routine surveys to monitor coral reefs in the Mariana Islands discovered something no one had anticipated: the largest Porites coral colony ever found on Earth. The hunt was not targeted. Nobody took a plane to the isolated Maug Islands in the Mariana archipelago with the intention…
When you stroll along Portsmouth Harbor’s docks on a clear morning, you’ll notice a certain kind of activity: students carrying equipment, research vessels being prepared, and the smell of salt from serious work near the water. For more than ten years, the University of New Hampshire has been quietly constructing something here. The federal government has now determined that the work merits a much larger platform. UNH has been chosen to spearhead NOAA’s inaugural Cooperative Institute Fostering Aquaculture Research and Markets, or CIFARM, a $13.5 million, five-year national initiative aimed at radically changing the way the US sources and grows…