Author: Derrick Lester

Twenty sizable ocean floor craters in the western Pacific are encircled by structures known as pipe swarms, which are passageways through the rock that allow superheated fluids to rise from below, on a section of seafloor located on the Caroline Plate about 80 kilometers from the edge of the Mussau Trench. Eleven square kilometers make up the whole system. Squat lobsters, shrimp, and anemones swim about the vent ports under the lights of the Fendouzhe submersible, feeding on bacteria that use hydrogen chemistry instead of sunlight. Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences described the place and published their findings…

The carbon budget, an estimate of how much CO2 humanity may still produce before the atmosphere heats beyond a certain threshold, is the figure at the heart of all climate targets, nationally decided contributions, and net-zero pledges. Models are the foundation of that figure. These models make assumptions about how the ocean functions as a carbon sink, including how much of the carbon emitted by humans is absorbed by seawater, how this absorption rate varies as the ocean warms, and how various biological and chemical processes in the water column influence how long the carbon remains sequestered once it enters…

A study ship has been testing the effects of changing the alkalinity of a tiny area of saltwater somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, around 40 miles off the coast of Oregon. The theory goes back to fundamental physical oceanography and is based on the fact that more alkaline ocean water absorbs more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. What happens to the zooplankton, phytoplankton, fish larvae, shellfish, and the larger ecosystem that inhabits and travels across that area of ocean when the water is altered in this way is the practical question. The researchers are making a thorough effort to learn.…

Over the past two years, there has been a noticeable shift in the framing surrounding ocean carbon removal in a Senate hearing room in Washington. The technology used to be mostly discussed in scientific literature and specialized environmental circles. It is a category of methods that includes everything from adding alkaline minerals to seawater to growing enormous amounts of macroalgae to improving the ocean’s natural carbon uptake through various chemical and biological interventions. It increasingly appears in the same rooms as offshore investment, fishery management, and energy policy. The most tangible legislative effort to date to establish a federal framework…

Fish are shaped by the shape of the ocean floor. That isn’t a scientific claim, but it sums up what an Ohio State team discovered when they examined almost 3,000 deep-sea fish species and charted how their bodies have evolved over time. After analyzing data on 2,882 species and publishing their findings in the journal Evolution, the researchers discovered a pattern that is cleaner than most evolutionary studies are able to produce: fish that inhabit ocean basins that have been isolated from one another for millions of years consistently arrive at the same body design. Convergent evolution is the term…

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…