Author: Derrick Lester

A quietly interesting thing about this is that the same group that helped India get to the moon is now working to send people to the bottom of the ocean. India’s first deep-sea submersible that can carry people is being built at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), which is an ISRO facility better known for making rocket parts and spacecraft structures. It’s called Samudrayaan. The name of the car is Matsya-6000. And by 2027, three Indian aquanauts will go down six kilometers into the ocean if everything goes as planned. That depth is not a small thing. The water…

A peaceful stretch of ocean floor runs along the edge of North America, where the land slowly disappears and falls into the deep Atlantic. This area probably doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it should. It’s known as the continental slope by scientists. A lot of people have never heard of it. What worries researchers like Uri ten Brink, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, is that not enough people know about these underwater canyons. He has spent years mapping them, one sonar image at a time, looking for something that no one wants to find. Based on…

Most of us have a fixed mental picture of the ocean: it’s bright, full of people, and lit by the sun. Reefs made of coral. A lot of fish are near the surface, catching light. It looks like the ocean in documentaries and vacation pictures. However, that picture of the sea only shows a very small part of what’s down there. Around 95% of the ocean’s volume is always cold and dark, and most things that try to stay alive think that it is always hostile. However. There is life down there, and it comes in forms that continue to…

There is a part of the ROV footage from the E/V Nautilus expedition in 2015 that still feels very personal for a scientific find. Someone on the ship says almost under their breath, “He’s tiny. It’s blue.” as the camera slowly moves across the ocean floor near Darwin Island, which is named after the man who also came to the Galapagos and couldn’t quite explain what he saw. Something is said by that reaction. These are people who study the deep sea. They’ve seen weird things before. Still, this small animal, about the size of a golf ball, that was…

The ocean did something amazing for decades, and no one asked it to. It quietly and without complaining took in about a quarter of all the carbon dioxide that people put into the air every year. Scientists knew this could not last any longer. It’s still scary to see the numbers going in the wrong direction, though. Researchers were getting more and more worried about what a new report from NOAA’s ocean monitoring work showed: parts of the ocean aren’t absorbing carbon like they used to. In some places, the situation has changed. CO2 used to be pulled down by…

In late July, the Ozarks get a certain kind of heat—not the dry, airy kind you get further west, but a heat that is thick, pressing, and impossible to get away from. This week, Springfield, Missouri is right in the middle of it, and the forecast doesn’t look like it will get any better. The high temperature on Monday is expected to reach 37°C, and there will be strong southwest winds in the morning that will change to calm winds in the afternoon. An Extreme Heat Warning has been sent out because it’s so hot, which is both scary and,…

Something very important about this year’s World Oceans Day theme is being kept quiet. It doesn’t tell us to “save” the ocean, which has always felt like an impossible task. There are words like “protect” and “preserve” on too many tote bags for them to lose most of their weight. “Reimagine: Beyond the world we know, a new relationship with our ocean” is the theme for World Oceans Day 2026. The word “reimagine” asks us to do something different. Not just what people post, but also how they think needs to change. It’s not as important as it might seem…

It’s kind of comforting when the weather does pretty much what it’s supposed to do for a week. It looks like late July 2026 will be a settled month at Castle Donington in Leicestershire. The pattern almost seems too good to be normal. Monday starts out cloudy, and it stays that way all morning. The temperature stays between 17 and 18 degrees. By early afternoon, the clouds are gone, and there is real sunshine. At the height of the day, the temperature will be about 22 degrees, which is nice but not too hot. Winds are still light, coming mostly…

Finding out that a process that controls Earth’s climate has been going on in ways scientists didn’t fully understand has been happening in the ocean that covers most of the planet. This is a quietly humbling realization. Researchers came to this realization at the end of last year, when Alyson Santoro, a microbial oceanographer at UCSB, led a team that published results in Nature Geoscience that changed what scientists thought they knew about how carbon is fixed in the deep sea. In short, the microbes that scientists thought were doing most of the carbon-fixing work in the deep ocean—a group…

A line in a new report from the Ocean Panel will stop you in your tracks if you read it slowly enough. It says that ocean-based climate solutions could help cut down on emissions around the world by up to 35% by 2050. 35% of the people. That’s not a mistake with the rounding. That’s not a note at the end. That’s about a third of the work that needs to be done to turn Earth from a habitable planet to something much less forgiving. It’s out there, covering 70% of the planet’s surface, mostly unfunded and unused. The idea…