Author: Derrick Lester

Around 9:15 on Sunday night, the text message arrived—the kind of warning that causes people in this region of the nation to set down their forks and move in the direction of a window. Northwest of Beresford, a small town in Lincoln County that most outsiders couldn’t locate on a map, a massive and extremely dangerous tornado was on the ground. Leola basements were flooding by 9:40. In the interim, the KELOLAND Storm Center emerged as South Dakota’s most significant screen for a few hours. On the northern plains, severe weather coverage follows a certain pattern, and it’s difficult to…

A small team of marine biologists is working on a project that would have seemed slightly ridiculous ten years ago, somewhere along the coast in La Jolla, in a building that smells slightly of warm electronics and salt. From a desk, they are observing coral reefs. Instead of using a livestream or a porthole, millions of underwater photos were used to create dense, multi-layered, three-dimensional reconstructions. This idea has been pursued for years by Scripps’ Sandin Lab, and it’s possible that technology has finally caught up to the ambition. It’s difficult to ignore the numbers. Each dive returns about 350…

A space agency lowering itself into the ocean has a subtly ridiculous quality. For the past few years, NASA—the organization most people associate with rockets and red planets—has been developing robots that descend rather than ascend. Martian dust or lunar regolith are not the destination. Pressure can crush a steel sphere like a soda can in the hadal zone, the area of the ocean named after the Greek underworld. You begin to see why this makes sense when you stand on the deck of a research ship such as the Nautilus. From above, the ocean does not appear strange. However,…

The ocean changes completely somewhere around 500 miles southeast of Hawaii, far below the warm surface where tourists snorkel and tuna boats trawl. At about 650 feet, sunlight becomes less intense. It disappears at 3,000 feet. At about 12,000 feet, you come to an abyssal plain the size of the continental United States. Continue on, past creatures that glow slightly in the cold. Almost no one on Earth has ever seen the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Nearly nine out of ten species down there, according to scientists, have never been given names. Nevertheless, this is the area where world leaders are currently…

Antarctica acted like the quiet student in the back of the climate change classroom for a very long time. Summer after summer, the Arctic was noisy, losing ice in plain sight, and the satellite photos were almost embarrassing in how accurately they depicted the situation. Somehow, Antarctica remained calm. Its sea ice even slightly increased through the late 2000s, providing scientists with a genuine conundrum to ponder and a new topic of discussion in some online forums. It’s difficult to ignore how frequently nature deviates from model predictions, at least until it does so abruptly. Then, in 2015, the floor…

Seeing the Pacific act like it’s August while standing on a pier in mid-May has a peculiar quality. The numbers below reveal a different picture, even though the water off northern California still has the typical grey-green sheen this time of year. The agency’s own marine heatwave alert system, which was developed in 2019 to monitor precisely this kind of thing, is now being asked to interpret something it was never quite intended for. NOAA’s satellites have been detecting an exceptionally warm sheet of ocean that just won’t go away. The northeast Pacific reached an average surface temperature of 20.6°C…

A Lion’s Mane jellyfish floats past a slope of old sediment somewhere beneath the Arctic ice, in water so chilly and dark it seems almost unreal. The scene is described almost reverently by researchers who have spent years lowering cameras into that black water. It’s peculiar down there. Silent. Almost nothing on the surface is stable in this sense. The scientists who first mapped this ecosystem are now publicly concerned that it might be destroyed before most people even realize it exists, following decades of slow, laborious discovery. It’s not a dramatic warning. After years of observing a slow problem…

In areas that hardly anyone can see, the ocean is changing. The water is heating up below the sunlit upper layers, far below the depths where most of us think warming really matters. It’s the kind of detail that doesn’t make the evening news, in part because the deep sea has always seemed to be the planet’s quiet basement—far away, chilly, and purportedly unaffected by whatever mayhem is happening on the surface. As it happens, that assumption was wishful thinking. Nitrosopumilus maritimus, one of the most prevalent microorganisms in the ocean, may be subtly adjusting to all of this, according…

A meeting that concludes without a decision has a subtly unsettling quality. Fishing fleets continue, delegates depart, statements are released, and the seabed, kilometers below, remains unchanged. At the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean meeting this year, member states had the opportunity to increase the current bottom-trawl prohibition from 1,000 meters to 800 meters. They didn’t. And the ensuing silence was louder than most people thought it would be. Naturally, conservation organizations were unimpressed. It sounds like advocacy rhetoric until you read the pilot data, but Oceana and MedReAct referred to it as a missed turning point. The studies…

Those who have spent weeks aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer claim that the first thing you notice on the bridge is not the cold. It’s the silence. When someone yells “land ahoy” after days of seeing nothing but pale, restless grey, the moment carries more weight than it probably should. The icebreaker moves through Antarctic water with a kind of mechanical patience. That is precisely what UC Santa Cruz chemical oceanographer Phoebe Lam said during her third visit. A scientist’s sense of scale is reset by something about Antarctica. Thousands of gallons of seawater and pieces of sea ice are…