Author: Derrick Lester

A robot arm descended toward the seafloor somewhere off the coast, in water so dark it could swallow a skyscraper whole. It stopped. For life, its camera scanned. When it saw none on the target rock, it reached down, picked up a manganese and nickel-encrusted nodule the size of a potato, and tugged. A tiny cloud of silt blossomed and vanished. The machine continued. According to Impossible Metals, a startup that has centered its entire pitch around the notion that the ocean floor can be harvested without hollowing it out, this is what “responsible” deep-sea mining looks like. The CEO…

Pulling a net out of the ocean and discovering that it is filled with translucent, pulsating masses of jellyfish rather than fish is incredibly unsettling. Since late January, trawler crews off the coast of Bangladesh have been managing dense blooms from deep-sea zones where fish were once abundant enough to justify burning the fuel. There was not a single dramatic event that brought about the shift. As is often the case with climate consequences, it quietly crept in. Surface waters were warmer than normal between November and January due to little rainfall and no seasonal cooling from freshwater runoff. The…

On a calm morning, you almost forget the sea has teeth when you stand on any section of the Coromandel Coast. The water is level. Boats used for fishing drift. In the same way that coastlines always do until they don’t, the whole thing feels gentle and permanent. What’s happening several kilometers below the surface, where temperature changes, pressure changes, and the signals that precede disaster move silently through the water column before anyone on shore has any idea, is what you can’t see and what no one standing there can see. For decades, scientists have been working to close…

When test results are inaccurate, a certain kind of silence occurs in the laboratory. Not incorrect in the sense of a mistake, but incorrect in the sense of something that doesn’t align with what anyone has been taught. When Boston University researchers extracted their samples from more than three kilometers below the Pacific Ocean’s surface and passed them through human immune cells, that seems to be precisely what happened. Nothing took place. There was no response from the cells. And that turns out to be the most concerning outcome imaginable. The expedition was conducted in the Phoenix Islands Protected Area,…

The expression “out of sight, out of mind” seems almost too practical. It explains why the ocean continues to lose, with unsettling accuracy. No capital city offers a view of the Baltic Proper. A harbor porpoise drowning in a gillnet cannot be heard. A propeller strike a thousand feet below the Mediterranean’s surface cannot cause a beaked whale to bleed. So, for the most part, nothing is done. The harbor porpoise, which is small, timid, and seldom captured on camera, lives in a state of political invisibility. The Baltic Proper population is in such dire danger that the Scientific Committee…

When something unexpected shows up on the screen, a certain type of stillness descends upon a research vessel. That silence lasted a bit longer than usual in August 2023, somewhere over the Gulf of Alaska. Over two miles below the Okeanos Explorer, the Deep Discoverer ROV stopped over a rocky outcrop as it glided through black water. No one on board could identify the smooth, golden-toned mound that was stuck to the rock; it had a little puncture near the top, giving the impression that something had crawled out of it. or into it. In a matter of days, the…

The deep ocean has been viewed for the majority of human existence as a sort of afterthought, a chilly, dark basement of the earth that is supposed to be biologically meaningless. That presumption is rapidly coming apart. An increasing amount of research, much of which has only been published in recent years, indicates that the seafloor is more akin to a silently humming network that connects ecosystems over thousands of kilometers of dark water than it is to a collection of isolated pockets. FieldDetailTopic FocusDeep-sea ecosystem connectivity and biodiversityLead Research InstitutionsMuseums Victoria Research Institute and the University of Oxford, Department…

The way we discuss climate change is peculiar. Nearly everything occurs at the surface, including the heatwaves we experience, the storms we capture on camera, and the coral reefs that photographers can truly access. However, the portion of the ocean that does the majority of the hard lifting is located far below all of that, in a blackness that most people will never be able to see. Additionally, it’s starting to act in ways that scientists weren’t entirely prepared for. Profile: The Deep Ocean Carbon SystemKey InformationRegion of focusTasman Sea & global abyssal zonesAverage depth where issues emerge500m to several…

Scientists have been gathering water samples for nearly 40 years somewhere off the coast of Labrador on a study vessel that has spent more nights at sea than most sailors care to count. The samples don’t appear particularly noteworthy. They may be mistaken for any handful of seawater drawn anywhere along that shore since they are cold, black, and slightly metallic when handled. However, the trace gasses dissolved inside them reveal a narrative that most of us have been ignoring. For a while now, the North Atlantic has been breathing more slowly than it formerly did. DetailInformationStudy TitleNorth Atlantic ventilation…

I was sitting in a café watching rain blur the windows when I first learned about China’s new ocean forecast system, and the timing seemed almost too perfect. The news hardly made an impression in the Western press when a nation declared that its experts could now anticipate the path of one of the planet’s most notoriously unpredictable currents seven months in advance. Perhaps the story was just too technical to make headlines. It’s also likely that no one was entirely sure how to interpret it. For those who haven’t spent much time studying ocean charts, the Indonesian Throughflow is…