Sometimes you notice that a quiet worry has evolved into something completely different. Not quite a panic. It’s more akin to a group clearing of throats, with academics, scientists, and historians all focusing on the same issue at roughly the same time, during the same season, and with the same urgency in their voices. Over the past few months, deep-sea mining has been experiencing that. The Natural History Museum released what it described as the most thorough analysis of the potential effects of ocean-floor extraction on marine life to date. The cultural and ecological stakes were thoroughly investigated by Yale…
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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When something that climate scientists have spent their careers studying begins to move more quickly than their models predicted, a certain kind of uneasiness descends upon them. Sometime early this year, that feeling appears to have reached NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, and it hasn’t gone away. Recently, Nathaniel Johnson, a research meteorologist on NOAA’s El Niño forecasting team, described the ongoing shift in the Pacific Ocean as “One of the most rapid transitions that I’ve seen.” This is not a casual statement from someone who has been trained to speak carefully. Johnson has spent enough time observing these cycles to…
The fact that one of the ocean’s most legendary creatures—the giant squid, the subject of sailor nightmares and Jules Verne novels—was recently discovered lurking off the coast of Western Australia using nothing more dramatic than a few liters of seawater is subtly humbling. No tentacle sightings. No dramatic video. Just genetic murmurs drifting miles below the surface in chilly, dark water, waiting to be heard by someone with the proper equipment. The discovery resulted from a study conducted by Curtin University that examined two submarine canyons, Cape Range and Cloates, which are located about 1,200 kilometers north of Perth, close…
No one on the research team anticipated anything especially out of the ordinary when the remotely operated vehicle Deep Discoverer descended more than two miles into the Gulf of Alaska in 2023. Oddly shaped corals, strange fish, and alien-looking invertebrates clinging to rocks are just a few of the oddities that deep-sea expeditions frequently discover. When working on NOAA’s Okeanos Explorer, scientists become accustomed to the unexpected. However, that day’s footage from the ROV’s camera showed something different. At about 3,250 meters below the surface, a rounded, golden, mound-shaped object with a tiny hole in it rested on a rocky…
At their Aircraft Operations Center in Lakeland, Florida, which has a subtle jet fuel and radar equipment odor, NOAA officials gathered on a warm Thursday morning in late May to deliver what most people perceived as comforting news. They stated that a below-average Atlantic hurricane season is anticipated in 2026. fewer storms. calmer seas. There is a 55% chance that this year won’t be too bad. That’s for a reason. The term “below-average season” carries a sort of subtle deception, as anyone who follows hurricane science closely enough is aware. It explains quantity. About consequences, it says very little. According…
The pictures have an almost disorienting quality. At the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, more than three miles below the surface, dark, lumpy spheres, each about the size of a potato, rest on reddish-brown mud. They resemble something that grew rather than formed, almost biological in appearance. However, what NOAA discovered in mid-April from the seafloor off American Samoa is not biological. It’s geology, and more and more it’s geopolitics. Initially, the first pictures of polymetallic nodules from federal waters close to American Samoa arrived silently. Described as a scientific achievement from an ongoing hydrographic survey spanning more than 30,000…
A Lockheed Martin WP-3D turboprop known as “Miss Piggy” is flying somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico right into conditions that most aircraft spend their whole operational lives attempting to avoid. Equipment is thrown across the cabin by turbulence. It’s raining so much that it sounds like gravel striking the fuselage. Scientists are gathering the atmospheric data that goes into every hurricane forecast you’ve ever seen on TV somewhere in the middle of that mayhem. The planes served the purpose for decades. Less so is the surrounding communications infrastructure. That might be about to change. Earlier this month, SD Government,…
What a small Spanish startup is doing on the periphery of Europe’s offshore energy frontier is subtly daring. While onshore wind farms and solar panels have dominated discussions about renewable energy, a company called Optimized Generators, or OptiGen as most industry insiders refer to them, has been focusing on an issue that major players have mostly avoided: how to construct a wind turbine that makes sense floating sixty meters below the ocean’s surface. This question’s numbers are startling. In waters too deep for traditional fixed-bottom turbines, more than 80% of the world’s offshore wind potential is located. That’s an enormous…
Along the Gulf Coast, something changes every May. Plywood is discreetly restocked by hardware stores. Families pull out their emergency supplies. A group of NOAA scientists then take the podium somewhere in Lakeland, Florida, and inform the nation of what to anticipate over the next six months. For the first time in a long time, the news was almost comforting this year. Nearly. According to NOAA’s official forecast for the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season, which was released on May 21, there will be 8 to 14 named storms, with 3 to 6 predicted to reach hurricane strength and only 1…
On a rainy afternoon in late June 2019, a research team lowered a bulbous three-seat submarine named Nadir into the Atlantic off the coast of Eleuthera in the Bahamas. It was starting to stop raining. The scientists watching from the deck probably didn’t care if it was a coincidence or a result of luck because they had spent a year preparing for this moment and the weather was free to do as they pleased. The bluntnose sixgill shark, which most people are unfamiliar with, was their target. Instead of five gills, there are six. Unsettlingly, emerald eyes catch light. an…