Author: Derrick Lester

Images from a crewed submersible that had recently spent time close to the Galapagos Rift at a depth of around 2,500 meters were sent to a team of oceanographers on board a research ship in the eastern Pacific in June 1977. As was customary for abyssal exploration at the time, the scientists on the surface anticipated seeing a cold, black, and essentially featureless bottom. Instead, they observed hydrothermal vents around by dense populations of clams, tube worms, and other species that, according to their biological framework, shouldn’t have existed. Not only did the discovery add a species to the list.…

Projections of sea level rise are based on mathematics. That is a pragmatic statement rather than a profound one. Insurance actuaries assessing flood risk in Norfolk, Virginia, coastal planners in Miami, and infrastructure engineers in Bangladesh all rely on figures that ultimately stem from physics equations explaining how water behaves as it warms. The issue that an increasing amount of oceanographic research has been addressing is that those equations have been based on oversimplified assumptions about the expansion of deep ocean water, which introduce mistakes that increase over decades. The thermal expansion coefficient, which is effectively the amount that a…

Chimneys of white carbonate and calcium erupt from the seafloor in the Lost City Hydrothermal Field, which rises from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at a depth of around 750 meters, resembling the remnants of an old structure. They are actively forming, accumulated over thousands of years by alkaline fluids seeping from the rock below; they are not ruins. The fluids have temperatures between 40 to 90 degrees Celsius, which is warm by mid-ocean norms. When the site was first described in 2000, researchers instantly recognized that the fluids contained substantial amounts of hydrogen gas. Not incidental hydrogen, not trapped hydrogen. For…

A building full of experts at NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, has been working on a seemingly simple but very challenging task: calculating the number of fish in the ocean. In order to conduct the surveys, research vessels must go out on a regular basis, trawl standardized transects, count what comes up, and process the data using stock assessment models that have been improved over decades. Commercial fishing catch limits are predicated on the judgments these models generate, despite the fact that they are flawed since fisheries research deals with limited data and a great deal…

The ocean floor on Minamitorishima Island, a small Japanese coral atoll located in the western Pacific around 2,000 kilometers southeast of Tokyo, contains something that businesses and governments have been calculating for years. Concentrations of heavy rare earth elements, especially yttrium and several dysprosium-rich compounds, are significantly higher in deep-sea mud at several thousand meters than in the majority of known terrestrial deposits. This zone has been thoroughly surveyed by Japan’s marine science agency, which has ran sample cores and created models of what might actually be extracted. The existence of the resource is not the question. The question is…

The summertime water temperature in the area between Point Conception and Point Arena off the coast of central California provides some insight into how well the wind has been working. The water close to the coast runs cold and dark green when it has—when powerful northerly winds have forced surface water offshore for weeks at a time. Phytoplankton is that color. Feeding on nutrients drawn up from depth by the upwelling process, billions of microscopic organisms bloom in concentrations dense enough to dye the water. The chlorophyll signal is so powerful that it appears from orbit as bright green streaks…

A Dumbo octopus floats by the camera of a remotely operated vehicle at about 3,000 meters below the Pacific Ocean’s surface, where the water pressure is around 300 times higher than it is at sea level and no sunlight has reached in geological timeframes. The video, which was taken by MBARI researchers off the coast of California, depicts an animal that swims quietly and efficiently. Its body is semi-translucent against the black water, and its two ear-like fins undulate in a rhythmic pattern. The skin appears to change under the lights of the submersible. Something shifts when it comes into…

Sunlight has been reduced to something hardly worth calling light at all at a depth of around 600 meters below the ocean’s surface. It is a weak, diffuse blue wash that comes from above and is so dim that it would appear to human eyes to be almost completely dark. The mesopelagic zone, often known as the twilight zone, is one of the most unusual locations on Earth where life has established itself. There is a great deal of pressure. There’s not enough food. Nevertheless, millions of tiny fish move through this ecosystem on a daily basis, and some of…

By most standards, obtaining a physical core sample from the deep ocean below is an amazing task. While a coring device descends several kilometers in water that gets colder, darker, and more pressured with each meter, a research vessel maintains position over an abyssal plain. The entire process may require more than a day. On a seafloor that makes up about 70% of the earth, the resulting core, a cylinder of sediment that may be a meter long, represents a tiny geographic pinpoint. The resulting science is genuine and worthwhile. In comparison to the space between sampling locations, the coverage…

In June 2026, a team from the Institute of Oceanology unveiled an AI model that they characterize as “crossing a line” in a research building in Qingdao, which overlooks a section of the Yellow Sea that has nourished Chinese maritime culture for millennia. This is a technical line, not a promotional one. The initial LangYa system could provide you with information about the ocean’s condition, including salinity distributions, temperature gradients, and general descriptions of the sea’s appearance both now and tomorrow. The purpose of LangYa 2.0 is to predict what the ocean will do. It sounds like a small difference.…