Author: Derrick Lester

The concept of a network of hydrophones sitting thousands of meters below the surface of the ocean, silently recording every tremor and groan of the Pacific without anyone having to be there, is almost unsettling. Not a ship. Not a crew. Just sound, passing through chilly, dark water, and reaching a sensor that records everything without complaining. This is precisely what the new passive acoustic monitoring systems currently undergoing testing and deployment throughout the Pacific basin accomplish. The implications for tracking submarine volcanic activity are so profound that scientists who have dedicated their careers to the issue are using terms…

The idea that you can know a creature was present somewhere without ever seeing it has a subtle disorienting quality. No picture, no sonar ping, no unintentional trawl net bringing something bright and frightening to the surface. Just water—regular seawater—carrying imperceptible biological clues that an animal was present, moving through the shadows, and conducting whatever business a giant squid does at depths where sunlight has never reached. That’s basically what happened off the coast of Ningaloo, Australia, in 2020. The expedition’s findings, which were published earlier this year in the journal Environmental DNA, are still causing a stir in the…

Standing at the Atlantic’s edge on a typical afternoon, there is a moment when the vast, gray-green ocean appears unchanged. The waves always break in the same manner. Overhead, gulls wheel. It seems to last forever. It isn’t. The Atlantic just recorded its hottest year ever recorded, according to scientists. What’s more difficult to accept is the almost casual certainty with which scientists deliver the news: this is not the worst of it. Climate tracking organizations report that ocean heat content has broken records worldwide for nine years running, but the Atlantic’s numbers are quite different. Surface temperatures in large…

There are creatures somewhere in the South Pacific, about six kilometers below the ocean’s surface, that were around when the last non-avian dinosaurs roamed the planet. They don’t have much drama. They don’t move quickly. By all scientific standards, they have been doing very little for about 100 million years, but they woke up when scientists eventually persuaded them to enter a lab and offered them food. They grew in number. They seemed to be alright. Knowing exactly what to do with that information is difficult. The University of Rhode Island and a number of other organizations collaborated with the…

Somewhere off the coast of Western Australia, in the middle of the night, when the ocean beneath you is almost three miles deep and full of things that have never seen light, a certain silence descends upon a research vessel. Standing on that deck, it’s difficult not to feel like an intruder. It’s as if you knocked on a door that wasn’t supposed to be opened. Apparently, that door leads to something remarkable. The results of an expedition into the Cape Range and Cloates submarine canyons, which run north of Perth close to the Ningaloo coastline—a region of ocean most…

A research ship will sail from the Oregon coast into the gray-green waters of the northeastern Pacific sometime in the middle of June. A buoy that is 80 meters below the surface will be found, hauled up, and returned to shore by the crew. It sounds almost like a routine part. It isn’t. That buoy is a component of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a network of over 900 sensors located in five ocean regions that was constructed over the course of more than ten years of planning, funded with $386 million, and intended to operate continuously for 25 to 30…

Standing at the edge of a research vessel in the Gulf and knowing that the water below you, stretching down through darkening shades of blue into complete murk, is, by all conventional wisdom, incompatible with life, is a subtly unsettling experience. These areas were dubbed “dead zones” by scientists. It felt like the right name. earned. And no one had much reason to doubt it for decades. Most likely, they ought to have questioned it earlier. A once-settled picture is being complicated by recent findings from researchers studying hypoxic zones, which are areas where dissolved oxygen drops to two milligrams…

The humidity in Kingston, Jamaica, is somewhat constant. For the better part of eight years, diplomats and business representatives have been working inside the International Seabed Authority’s headquarters to reach a consensus on regulations pertaining to deep ocean floor mining. The Caribbean moves apathetically outside. It’s an odd setting for what is quietly turning into one of the extractive industry’s more significant financial standoffs. However, Kingston is not the site of the standoff. In the boardrooms of Zurich, Hannover, and Vienna, some of the most influential insurers in the world have begun to do something out of the ordinary: abandoning…

When you read a study that claims something irreversible has already occurred, you feel a certain kind of dread. Not “may happen by 2050.” Not “could happen.” Already occurred. According to recent research from the University of Edinburgh, which monitored chemical changes in Arctic waters over a 20-year period, the ocean ecosystem seems to have reached a tipping point sometime around 2009. Silently. without any headlines. The majority of people on the planet were viewing something else. The offender isn’t as dramatic as we’ve come to anticipate from stories about climate change. No one catastrophic incident. No obvious flood or…

Trillions of fist-sized rocks are sitting somewhere between Mexico and Hawaii, at depths where sunlight has never reached and pressure would crush most machinery flat. Over millions of years, they gradually accumulated around shark teeth and pieces of shell, forming the minerals that power consumer electronics and electric car batteries today. They sat quietly for a long time. That might not go on for very long. One of the biggest financial bets on the future of deep-sea mining to date is the announced merger of American Ocean Minerals Corporation and Odyssey Marine Exploration, which is valued at about $1 billion.…