The disparity between our actual knowledge of the ocean and its importance is almost embarrassing. Roughly 71% of the planet is covered by water. Most of the oxygen we breathe comes from it. It supports a global economy valued at well over a trillion dollars and provides food for billions of people. Nevertheless, only 15% of the seafloor has been mapped using contemporary techniques. Human eyes have never seen more than 5%. The ocean is still remarkably obscure for something so essential to life on Earth; in some ways, it is even less understood than the surface of Mars. A…
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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The salmon run occurs every June. On their way back to the rivers where they were born—the Yukon and the Kuskokwim, streams whose names most Americans couldn’t find on a map—they push north through the chilly Pacific, navigating the slender passes between the Aleutian Islands. It is one of the more traditional rhythms in North American culture. Additionally, witnessing its breakdown in real time is something that is difficult for those who rely on it to translate into policy language or court filings. Charlie Wright spent decades downstream in Tanana after growing up in the Yukon River village of Rampart.…
When a cube of seafloor mud is brought onto a ship’s deck, run through a sieve, and found to contain something no one has ever seen before, it is a strange moment in deep-sea research. It’s not particularly dramatic. It’s silent. It was a spindly, pale creature sitting in a tray of sediment, completely unaffected by the fact that it had just completely disrupted someone’s conception of life on Earth. The scientific community is only now starting to consider the implications of that moment, which has been occurring more frequently lately. Numerous previously unidentified crustacean species have been discovered over…
In engineering, there is a point at which a proof-of-concept ceases to be theoretical and becomes something completely different. Something tangible and significant. That’s essentially what happened in late April when Cellula Robotics, based in Burnaby, British Columbia, announced that its Envoy autonomous underwater vehicle, which was powered solely by a hydrogen fuel cell system, had finished a fully submerged mission covering 2,023 kilometers over 385 continuous hours. Not a single surface. No recuperation. There is no human hand behind the wheel. For comparison, the approximate driving distance between New York and Miami is 2,023 kilometers. However, this vehicle completed…
The ocean has been doing the work for billions of years, long before humans had any idea of climate or thermostats. It absorbs heat, moves it around, releases it gradually, and silently prevents the planet from swinging between extremes. Scientists occasionally find it difficult to explain how life on Earth depends on this system’s ongoing operation because it is so vast and fundamental. The ocean is now displaying indications that even its enormous capacity has limits after decades of absorbing the effects of industrial civilization. The figures are truly astounding. Since the Industrial Revolution, the ocean has absorbed about 90%…
A tiny poisonous snail is going about its ancient business somewhere beneath the coastal waters off Florida, at depths most people will never see and few researchers have thoroughly investigated. It shoots barbed hooks into fish, releases clouds of paralyzing chemistry into cold, dark water, and apparently produces molecules that pharmaceutical scientists are now frantically trying to obtain. The organism is the Asprella lineage of cone snails, and the substances concealed within its venom gland have emerged as one of the more genuinely surprising tales in modern drug research. It’s important to consider how uncommon this circumstance is. For hundreds…
The thought of an ocean having difficulty breathing is subtly unnerving. Over 70% of this planet’s surface is made up of water, and for the majority of human history, its depths seemed limitless—unknowable, yes, but essentially stable. This assumption is currently undergoing an uncomfortable real-time revision. The ocean is losing oxygen more quickly, more deeply, and in more locations than the models predicted, rather than slowly and neatly as some early predictions suggested. For years, the numbers have been increasing. The global ocean has already lost about 2% of its oxygen since the 1960s, which is about twice as much…
Tracking an unmanned, solar-powered boat as it passes Wake Island in the middle of the night, thousands of miles away from anyone who built it, has an almost surreal quality. When Seasats, a San Diego-based maritime company, sent one of its Lightfish autonomous surface vessels from California toward Japan last year, anyone with a browser could watch the entire event in real time. The ship was 350 pounds in weight. It measured twelve feet in length. It traveled over 7,500 miles in 150 days. No human ever set foot on it. The Lightfish can run for months without going back…
The ability of the same cable carrying a video call from London to New York to sense an earthquake occurring thousands of miles away under the correct circumstances is subtly astounding. Not in a symbolic sense. You can actually feel the slight mechanical tremor of a seafloor fault by observing how light behaves. The ocean floor was essentially a blind spot in seismology for many years. Since two thirds of the Earth’s surface is underwater, the equipment required to properly monitor it has always been costly, challenging to use, and prone to loss. There have been repercussions from that observational…
It’s easy to overlook the crisis when standing on the edge of Kachemak Bay in the early morning and observing the fog hovering low over the water. The bay appears old and unconcerned. The water flows in the same manner as before. However, the people whose lives depend on what exists beneath that surface are beginning to sense that something has changed—quietly, chemically, and imperceptibly. America’s coastal oceans are changing chemically. The pH of surface ocean waters has decreased by 0.1 units since the industrial revolution. When you realize that the pH scale is logarithmic, that seemingly innocuous number actually…