When you first learn about OWLS, it seems almost unrealistically ambitious. The work of several dozen laboratory scientists can be performed by eight automated instruments combined into a single system. These instruments can track microscopic movement in real time, analyze liquid samples, and search for the chemical fingerprints of life. It was created by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory with a single, somewhat startling goal in mind: to examine ice fragments that were erupting from Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which is about a billion miles away from the closest repair facility. However, while traveling to the outer solar system, an intriguing event…
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 race to mine the deep sea has a subtle unsettling quality. It’s not visible to you. No visible scars on a hillside, no protests outside a mine entrance. All of this is happening thousands of meters below the surface, in complete darkness, and under intense pressure, and that invisibility might be the exact issue. In an effort to create the most comprehensive understanding of the potential effects of deep-sea mining on marine life, a recent review headed by Professor Adrian Glover of the Natural History Museum in London has examined more than 200 published and unpublished reports covering more…
The fact that the system that alerts millions of Americans to tornadoes, flash floods, and potentially fatal storms was initially developed at the same time that people were still learning how to use dial-up internet is particularly ironic. Since the 1990s, the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System, or AWIPS, has served as the foundation of the National Weather Service. In general, it has been successful. However, being adequate and working are two different things, and for the forecasters who depend on it on a daily basis, the difference has gotten bigger every year. That is now changing. Contracts to completely…
The idea of a platform the height of a forty-story building, sitting in almost complete darkness more than a kilometer below the South China Sea, extracting natural gas from rock formations that no human hand will ever physically touch has an almost cinematic quality. That is the reality of Shenhai Yihao in China, which is now fully operational following years of development, testing, and a highly visible Phase I debut back in 2021. With proven geological reserves now confirmed at over 150 billion cubic meters, the field has reached its intended production capacity of 4.5 billion cubic meters of natural…
When the forecast maps are released and no one has anything comforting to say, a certain kind of quiet dread descends upon agricultural communities. Parts of Ohio seem to be experiencing that emotion at the moment. The majority of the United States faces higher-than-even chances of a warmer-than-average summer, according to NOAA’s most recent seasonal outlook, which was made public by the Climate Prediction Center. Ohio, which is still dealing with the aftermath of last year’s historic drought, is closely monitoring every contour line on those maps. By all standards, the summer of 2024 was shocking. For the first time…
A picture of a construction crew somewhere deep underground, knee-deep in water that shouldn’t be there, staring at a stationary tunnel boring machine is one that you can practically picture without actually seeing it. This isn’t speculative. Something very similar occurred in Sri Lanka for almost ten years on a project now known as the Uma Oya Multipurpose Development Project, costing hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency engineering, lost energy revenue, and delays. Water was not meant to consume the tunnel; rather, it was meant to transport it. A USD 514 million EPC contract was approved for the 15.3-kilometer…
Every shift, a small team of forecasters watches the Sun somewhere in Boulder, Colorado, in a building that would go unnoticed. Not in a symbolic sense. Tracking eruptions, magnetic shifts, and billion-ton clouds of plasma that occasionally hurtle toward Earth at speeds that make most natural phenomena seem courteous is literally watching it. The Space Weather Prediction Center of NOAA owns the building, and what takes place within is far more significant than most people realize. The topic of space weather is not something that is discussed over dinner. It doesn’t receive the breathless coverage of a wildfire or hurricane…
There are world records that cause front pages to scramble and stadiums to erupt. Then there are records set by a Dutch ship using robotic arms 600 meters below the Indian Ocean’s surface in almost complete darkness, and those usually pass with little fanfare. That’s essentially what happened last year when Boskalis, the massive maritime company based in the Netherlands, discreetly finished the deepest excavation project in its history off the northwest Australian coast of Dampier. The engineering community took notice. The majority of others didn’t. The BOKA Tiamat, a ship that doesn’t exactly make headlines on its own but…
When forecasters predict a slow hurricane season, a certain silence descends upon coastal towns. People can breathe more easily. The plywood is kept in the garage. And somewhere in a Silver Spring, Maryland government office, meteorologists look at maps of sea surface temperature and attempt to explain something that most people have heard of but few truly comprehend. El Niño is both the beginning and the end of this year’s explanation, and it returned stronger than many had anticipated. The most severe portion of the Atlantic hurricane season is concentrated around mid-September. The season officially began on June 1 and…
Since 1869, a weather station in Lawrence, Kansas, has been taking temperature readings. There were only 37 states in the union that year, Ulysses S. Grant was president, and the transcontinental railroad had just been finished. The phonograph had not yet been created by Thomas Edison. Alexander Graham Bell hadn’t called anyone yet. No March in Lawrence had felt as hot as March 2026 in 157 years, despite two world wars, the Great Depression, the Space Age, and everything that followed. Then it did. The figures have been in the back of people’s minds ever since NOAA’s National Centers for…