Author: Derrick Lester

On the Aleutian Peninsula of Alaska, there is a time in mid-May when the strain of an entire fishing season becomes nearly intolerable. There will be salmon runs soon. The fleets are prepared. And until very recently, the passage that saves ships 160 nautical miles and 20 hours of arduous sailing was essentially lost somewhere in the narrow, tide-churned waters of Bechevin Bay. Gone is not hyperbole. 28 of the 29 buoys that marked the channel through Bechevin Bay were gone by the time the U.S. Coast Guard evaluated the damage this spring; they had been completely destroyed by the…

Something has been secretly recording in the submarine canyons off the southwest coast of Western Australia, at depths where light vanishes and pressure turns into its own form of violence. The mineral architecture of deep-sea corals, which grow incredibly slowly and construct their skeletons one thin layer at a time over decades and centuries, is found in calcium carbonate, not on paper or in pixels. It’s difficult not to imagine them as nature’s filing cabinet, methodically preserving the ocean’s chemistry, temperature, and disposition while the rest of the world was mainly ignorant of their existence. A group of international scientists…

About halfway between Hawaii and Mexico, there is a section of the Pacific Ocean where the seafloor resembles something from a fever dream. The seabed is covered in lumpy, dark formations, roughly the size and shape of potatoes, thousands of feet below the surface, in almost complete darkness and cold that would kill a human in minutes. Like trees counting time, they have been sitting there for millions of years, slowly growing and building up rings of nickel, cobalt, manganese, and copper. They are referred to by scientists as polymetallic nodules. They are referred to as an opportunity by mining…

A group of environmental organizations filed a federal lawsuit on April 20, the sixteenth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, to prevent BP from drilling one of the deepest oil wells ever attempted in the Gulf of Mexico. The timing wasn’t accidental. It was a declaration. Kaskida is the name of the project in question. Since discovering the field in 2006 and spending years creating the kind of high-pressure drilling technology that might actually reach it, BP has been quietly working toward it for almost 20 years. The location, which is about 250 miles off the coast of Louisiana at…

There is a specific type of flooding that doesn’t make its presence known by wind or thunder. It simply appears, silently and almost courteously, whether it’s pooling in a Charleston parking lot on a sunny afternoon or lapping over a seawall in Annapolis. It’s known to longtime residents of these towns as “nuisance flooding.” Like a neighbor who is consistently a little late, it’s the kind of thing you learn to prepare for. However, that neighbor might be bringing company this year. El Niño has officially formed in the tropical Pacific, according to NOAA’s mid-June confirmation. By winter, forecasters predict…

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Thursday was one of those Washington moments that don’t make the evening news but still have an impact. In front of senators, Wesley Brooks, a soft-spoken EPA official with experience in regulatory affairs, made statements that cause mining executives to recline in their seats. Trump has chosen Brooks to lead the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, a title so awkward that the majority of Americans are unaware of it. However, the bureau is important. It influences how the United States communicates with the rest of the world about plastics,…

There has been a blind spot hovering just above the waves for the majority of the time meteorologists have been flying into hurricanes. Punching through the eyewall, hurricane hunter aircraft can collect data while in the air and transmit it back to Miami forecasters. However, the lowest few hundred feet above the ocean, where a storm truly determines its desired strength, has largely gone unmeasured. Skimming that close to the water is too risky for a P-3 Orion. That layer remained a mystery for decades. That guess became somewhat less blind this year. NOAA’s operational Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System,…

In the middle of the Atlantic, somewhere over a section of seafloor that no human eye has ever directly seen, a certain kind of silence descends upon a ship deck at four in the morning. For years, the NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer has lowered Deep Discoverer, its remotely operated vehicle, into that silence while a live feed beams images of creatures that resemble rejected concept art rather than biology. However, something changed on that ship beginning in 2021. Scientists started sketching water, which is far less dramatic to look at, alongside the cameras. It turns out that the footage might…

Fortaleza is located on the northeastern coast of Brazil, where the Atlantic Ocean stretches far enough into the horizon to cease appearing like water and begin to resemble a fact of the cosmos. In a way, it’s a suitable environment for discussing how little we truly understand about what’s underneath all that blue. No camera has ever been able to reach the seafloor somewhere out there, and in most newsrooms, that doesn’t really bother anyone. A new workshop is attempting to bridge that gap. Recently, the Internews-run Earth Journalism Network announced a practical training program for Brazilian journalists in Fortaleza…

It’s really hard to put into words what it’s like for a researcher to watch a 3D laser scan of a gelatinous deep-sea creature rotate slowly on a screen for the first time—something that has never been seen by human eyes before. Not precisely excitement. More akin to vertigo. Although the ocean has always been enormous, we’re starting to realize how much we’ve been missing recently due to the convergence of satellite technology and precise mapping tools. Our maps of the ocean floor were embarrassingly crude for decades. With some discomfort, scientists have noted that we have charted Mars’ surface…