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…
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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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…
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A commercial fisherman pulls up something that was never supposed to be on the hook during a brief, usually hectic moment on the water. A drowsy, tangled loggerhead sea turtle. An Atlantic sturgeon that shouldn’t be there is breaking the surface. A sawfish with small teeth. What a fisherman knows or doesn’t know can make the difference between a dead animal and one that has been recovered in those brief moments. Furthermore, it can increasingly mean the difference between a career that is quietly collapsing due to federal infractions and a license that remains intact. NOAA Fisheries is attempting to…
Eleven men perished on a drilling platform sixty miles off the coast of Louisiana early on April 20, 2010, and the federal government’s relationship with offshore oil has never fully recovered. Not only did the Deepwater Horizon rig sink, but it also created a wound in the Gulf floor that bled for 87 days in a row, releasing an estimated 134 million gallons of crude into waters that were home to bottlenose dolphins, shrimp fleets, and Kemp’s ridley sea turtle nesting grounds. That statistic does not age silently. It’s important to note that NOAA mobilized within three hours of the…
The fundamental framework of weather forecasting has essentially not changed in decades. Every twelve hours, massive physics-based systems churn through supercomputers to solve thousands of fluid dynamics equations, creating maps that meteorologists then analyze, debate, and translate into the five-day forecast you see on your phone before deciding whether to bring an umbrella. It functions. It has consistently been effective. However, observing how NOAA has been discreetly rearranging that whole system lately gives the impression that something truly different is taking place. NOAA formally launched a new generation of AI-driven global weather models in December 2025, launching three distinct systems…
Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, roughly 1,900 kilometers southeast of Tokyo, a drilling vessel called the Chikyu sat above one of the stranger geological curiosities on Earth — a thick layer of clay-like mud sitting nearly six kilometers beneath the surface, packed with minerals that the modern world simply cannot do without. In early February 2026, Japan announced it had done what no country had done before: successfully retrieved rare-earth-rich sediment from that depth, pulling a slurry of ancient seabed mud up through reinforced pipes and into the light. Japan demonstrated the technical feasibility of continuously pumping rare-earth-bearing mud from…
The idea that someone standing on the deck of a research vessel, somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, can pull out a phone and cross-reference a creature hauled up from four kilometers below with a database of over 25,000 species without a Wi-Fi signal is almost disorienting. That’s what Deep-Sea ID enables, and it’s important to consider how peculiar and subtly important that is. The World Register of Deep-Sea Species, a taxonomic database that debuted in December 2012 and has been steadily expanding ever since, served as the inspiration for the app, which was created at the Natural History…