Something strange has been going on this week in a quiet area of Hagerstown Regional Airport. The Rider Jet Center, the airport’s fixed base operator, is home to a research aircraft manned by a group of federal scientists who aren’t here by accident. The aircraft is located beyond the regular arrivals and the bustle of small charter traffic. They are here because the air above this city in mid-Maryland, which is conveniently close to Washington, D.C., turns out to be just what they need. For the better part of the week, the team from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric…
Author: Derrick Lester
Derrick Lester
Derrick Lester is a professor and editor at indeep-project.org. His academic career has been molded by a single, enduring obsession: the sea and all life in it. Drawing from marine biology, oceanography, and the kind of hard-won field knowledge that only comes from spending significant time on and under the water, Derrick's writing has the depth of a scholar thanks to his years of research and teaching experience. His writing delves into the science of marine life with the inquisitiveness of someone who has never fully moved past the wonder of what exists beneath the surface. Derrick hopes to introduce readers to a world that encompasses over 70% of the planet and is, in many respects, still largely unexplored through his contributions to indeep-project.org.
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The image is almost surreal: a huge machine vacuuming up lumpy dark nodules that took millions of years to form, crawling slowly across the pitch-black ocean floor more than two miles below the surface. It’s not science fiction. In the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a region of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Mexico, The Metals Company is actively proposing to do just that. Additionally, the U.S. government has determined that it is prepared to proceed immediately rather than waiting for the rest of the world to reach a consensus on how this should operate. The United States has essentially left the…
In late May, the quiet before hurricane season officially begins, when grocery stores covertly replenish bottled water shelves and residents begin to eye their roof tarps, a certain kind of dread descends on coastal towns. Along the Gulf Coast, that sentiment has always been present. However, it has a heavier burden this year. NOAA’s data is hard to ignore, and the message is clear: the window of opportunity to prepare is closing more quickly than most people realize, the ocean is getting warmer, and storms are getting stronger. In the Gulf, hurricanes are nothing new. Flooding isn’t either. However, what…
At the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, something almost paradoxical is taking place. Businesses vying to extract polymetallic nodules from the seafloor have spent years, sometimes more than ten years, gathering what they claim are the most extensive environmental datasets ever put together for any deep-ocean industrial operation. thousands of photos of the seafloor. Oceanographic monitoring is ongoing. The majority of marine biologists have never reached the depths where net samples were taken. It’s truly impressive work based just on the numbers. However, the scientific community, environmental groups, and an increasing number of government regulators continue to have serious doubts.…
A federal map shows that about 62,000 square miles of ocean off the Northeast coast are seasonally off-limits to traditional lobster fishing. The cause is straightforward and excruciating: for decades, North Atlantic right whales have been silently strangled by the vertical ropes that connect surface buoys to seafloor traps. Over 85% of the species have entanglement-related scars. When a line is first wrapped around their bodies, some whales manage to survive. Before they pass away from their injuries, others drag hundreds of pounds of equipment through the water for months. Aerial survey crews captured a young female right whale (catalog…
If you’ve ever stood at the ocean’s edge at night, there comes a time when it doesn’t feel familiar. A few feet out, the water turns dark. The sound turns into something that predates language. And it dawns on you, perhaps for the first time, that you truly don’t know what’s going on below the surface—not a hundred feet, not a mile, and most definitely not below a thousand meters, where sunlight completely disappears and pressure turns into a physical force that could instantly crush a human body. For a long time, NOAA has been reflecting on that ignorant moment.…
One of the most talked-about infrastructure projects in southwest Nigeria was put on hold for two years—not due to a lack of funding, investors leaving, or a withdrawal of support from the federal government. A much more embarrassing issue caused the Ondo Deep Seaport, a vast project spanning 2,771 hectares of Ilaje coastline, to stall: a name that shouldn’t have been on a government license. Speaking at a press conference prior to his inauguration, Governor Lucky Aiyedatiwa publicly confirmed it over the weekend. The implications that lay beneath his calm, almost subdued explanation were anything but. Whoever handled the paperwork…
Seeing a federal agency update its forecast every thirty minutes has a subtle unnerving quality. Usually, science doesn’t operate like that. Science is patient, methodical, and based on collected data. However, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center found itself doing something more akin to live journalism than long-range forecasting when a cluster of coronal mass ejections launched from an already agitated region of the Sun started arriving at Earth with more force than anyone had anticipated. This involved watching instruments, reading signals, and pushing new assessments before the previous ones had time to settle. It began with a sunspot, as these…
A camera on a remotely controlled vehicle was gliding several kilometers below the Pacific’s surface in early October of last year when an amazing image appeared on the screen. A pale, nearly translucent creature with tentacles trailing in long, delicate threads and fins shaped like orchid petals drifted into the frame. It was a bigfin squid, a species that has been seen by scientists less than twice in recorded history. No one has ever caught one in person. Polymetallic nodules and geopolitical agreements were completely forgotten for a brief moment by the crew of the E/V Nautilus and thousands of…
The bone-dry reservoirs of Arizona, the wilting cotton fields of the Southern Plains, and the cracked earth of West Texas all told a story that climate forecasters were unable to fully understand for decades. The figures from the Pacific Ocean appeared to be accurate. The forecasts made sense. Season after season, however, the predictions fell short of the actual suffering. It turns out that there was a quantifiable explanation for that gap. In recent years, NOAA’s conventional approach to tracking El Niño and La Niña has experienced notable misses, and researchers have finally determined a major cause. Sea surface temperatures…