On May 1st, the season began. It ended on June 7th. After 37 days of recreational snowy grouper fishing in federal waters in the South Atlantic, there was silence. The closure wasn’t particularly shocking to anyone keeping an eye on what’s been going on beneath the Atlantic’s surface. However, there is a weight that is hard to ignore when it comes this early and decisively. Around that early June date, NOAA Fisheries estimated that recreational landings would reach the 2026 annual catch limit of 1,713 fish, prompting the announcement of the closure. Not the following month. Not by the end…
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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One of India’s busiest appellate courts, surrounded by piles of paper, legal briefs, and tax codes that no one outside the profession willingly reads, is where a dispute over what occurs miles beneath the ocean’s surface eventually made its way. This is a unique kind of irony. That’s essentially what happened with Western Geco International Ltd., a business whose Gurugram project office was conducting seismic surveys in deep water to gather geological data offshore, which is technically unglamorous. Regarding the legal implications of that work, the service tax authorities had different opinions. The case, which was heard by the Principal…
Hurricane season brings with it a certain kind of dread—not the storm itself, but the hours leading up to it, when you watch the forecast cone change on your screen and wonder how accurate any of it is. Most people believe that the best data is somewhere. They believe the system is operational. That assumption needs to be seriously examined right now. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has spent decades developing what many meteorologists believe to be the world’s most advanced weather forecasting infrastructure, including ocean buoys sending live data from the Atlantic, satellites measuring ocean temperatures, and weather…
The idea that parts of the Pacific seafloor, which are so far away and so dark that most people will never be able to see them, are being put up for auction this summer seems a little surreal. Not in a far-off future. this summer. And perhaps all the way through autumn. That is the current state of affairs in Washington, where the Trump administration is acting at a rate that has shocked even those who anticipated swift action. President Trump issued an executive order in April of last year with the goal of creating a deep-sea mining sector virtually…
A fisherman named Thanh hauls in his nets on a calm morning along the Vietnamese coast and discovers that they are lighter than they have been in years. He has been venturing farther—perilously farther—and returning with less. He can figure out why without a satellite report. A few weeks ago, he saw the big ships sail by, their lights flickering on the horizon like a city moving slowly. The water felt different by the time they were gone. Emptier. This is not a singular incident. Small-scale fishermen are complaining about the same thing throughout Southeast Asia, from the Gulf of…
China is the world leader in deep-sea exploration, and the distance between Beijing and Washington is widening. The sight of a white research ship zigzagging across the Northwest Pacific, ostensibly cataloguing potato-shaped rocks on the ocean floor, while its location beacon periodically blinks off the map, is subtly unsettling. Since 2016, that ship, the Xiang Yang Hong 01, which translates to “Facing the Red Sun” with almost poetic bluntness, has been doing just that. Furthermore, it might not be the only one doing more than it seems. Eight Chinese state-owned ships officially designated for deep-sea mining research were tracked in…
For many years, the island nations of the Pacific held a moral significance that larger, more affluent nations were unable to match. Their leaders represented coastlines that were already engulfing villages when they stood at the podium of international climate summits, not GDP figures or carbon credit schemes. Geographical location, lived urgency, and a collective voice that remained remarkably cohesive for the most part all contributed to that credibility. Therefore, it’s difficult to ignore how rapidly that unity is starting to waver. The ocean floor is directly traversed by the fault line. The industrial extraction of mineral deposits from seamounts,…
A reef that just vanishes has a subtle, unsettling quality. Not overfished, not bleached, not destroyed by development—just gone. As if the ocean had chosen to hold its breath, it was absent from the fossil record for over a millennium. Scientists are just now starting to figure out why, but that is precisely what occurred some 5,000 years ago deep beneath the waters off the Galápagos Islands. One of the most comprehensive ecological timelines ever put together for deep-sea ecosystems was created by researchers at the University of Bristol and published in PNAS. The study reconstructed 117,000 years of deep-water…
The fact that humans have mapped the surface of Mars more thoroughly than the bottom of our own oceans is subtly unsettling. If you were to watch a 72-foot autonomous ship slip out of the harbor and into open water in July 2022 while standing at the edge of San Francisco Bay, you might assume you were witnessing something commonplace. A boat is departing. occurs daily. However, the Saildrone Surveyor was sailing toward the unknown, bound for areas of the Alaskan seafloor that no instrument, much less a human, had ever meaningfully documented. You are stopped cold by the numbers…
There is a certain type of carelessness that appears with the best of intentions. When marine ecologist Andrew Thaler boarded the MV NorSky off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2008, he sincerely thought that deep-sea mining could be done ethically and that the seafloor could release its metals without losing its soul. He wasn’t innocent. He was a meticulous scientist working with Nautilus Minerals, a mining company, to determine whether extraction at Solwara I, a hydrothermal vent field, could continue with the least amount of environmental damage. His perspective was drastically altered by what he saw on the…