Author: Derrick Lester

There is an odd sort of dress rehearsal going on somewhere in a flooded quarry in Gloucestershire. A British company called Deep is getting ready for something that, until recently, remained firmly in the realm of science fiction. Engineers lower test modules into the murky green water, and divers circle them. They hope to have a permanent human presence on the ocean floor by 2027. Not a quick visit. Not a joke. a home. Ten years ago, this kind of ambition would have prompted courteous eye-rolls. However, the discourse surrounding extreme environments has changed. The seabed has quietly and unexpectedly…

An agreement was signed earlier this year somewhere south of Starkville, beyond the long stretch of pine and farm road that characterizes this region of Mississippi. On paper, it appeared to be the kind of bureaucratic handshake that most people would never bother reading about. A cooperative research and development agreement between a university and a naval command. It was a modest press release. The vocabulary was technical. However, if you sit with it for a while, you get the impression that something bigger is being quietly constructed here in a state more frequently associated with cotton and catfish than…

The deep sea, a location that most of us will never see and seldom consider, has an odd quiet that makes it simple to forget what is at risk. Nevertheless, a struggle is taking place somewhere in the hallways of Kingston, Jamaica, where the International Seabed Authority convenes, over who has the authority to determine what occurs four kilometers below the ocean’s surface. Now that eight UN human rights experts have voiced their opinions, their message is remarkably direct. They contend that the existing framework is insufficient. They maintain that international law must serve as the foundation for ocean governance…

On a serene August morning, drive south on US-1 past Key Largo, and the water appears incredibly pure. Glassy turquoise is the color that appears on postcards. You wouldn’t believe that one of the planet’s oldest living structures is being destroyed by something slower and more bizarre than a heatwave. For the past ten years, the reefs off the southeast coast of Florida have been held accountable for climate change, and with good reason. Beneath that one, however, is a more subdued tale that has less to do with the sky and more to do with what we flush, drain,…

Fishermen on the docks close to Newport, Oregon, continue to discuss the strange summer beaches. Thousands of pink, finger-shaped creatures were washed up, glossy and translucent in the sunlight, with a subtle cucumber-salt scent. They had no name among the locals. Researchers did. The sudden, overwhelming presence of pyrosomes along the Pacific coast in 2017 and 2018 proved to be more than just a curiosity. The ocean had been silently issuing this warning for years. What scientists were starting to suspect has now been clarified by a recent study that was published in Nature Communications. Off the West Coast, marine…

The figures didn’t add up for years. Climate models had consistently predicted that more ancient, carbon-laden water would churn up from the deep, flooding the surface and gradually impairing the ocean’s capacity to absorb new CO2, as global warming increased and westerly winds over the Southern Ocean strengthened. Based on decades of knowledge about oceanography, the projection made sense. Nevertheless, the anticipated decrease in the Southern Ocean’s carbon absorption was not evident in the actual observational data. Researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany have now published a study in Nature Climate Change that explains why, and in a…

The idea that science can find a world—a living, breathing, biologically impossible world—and then watch it vanish before it is fully comprehended is incredibly unsettling. Deep-sea hydrothermal vents are those boiling, mineral-spewing fissures in the ocean floor that have silently supported life for millions of years without anyone on the surface realizing they existed. Jack Corliss and Tjeerd van Andel’s descent into the Galápagos Rift in a small research submersible named Alvin in February 1977 marked the first documented encounter. Giant tubeworms, white crabs, thick bacterial mats covering the seafloor, and entire communities of organisms flourishing in the absence of…

Antarctica seemed to be the only dependable exception on Earth for many years. The sea ice encircling the southern continent continued to expand while the Arctic was clearly disintegrating, with shrinking summers, thinning ice, and retreating coastlines. Scientists took note of it, discussed it, and secretly hoped it was comforting. It didn’t. Antarctica’s sea ice unexpectedly tumbled off a cliff in 2016. And it hasn’t returned yet. What took place? For almost a decade, the scientific community has been debating this issue, which raises unsettling questions about our true understanding of the planet we are meant to be observing. The…

Climate scientists worked quietly confidently about the Southern Ocean for about thirty years. The numbers made it very evident that it was absorbing a significant amount of carbon. It was verified by models. Datasets supported it. The broader understanding of the global carbon cycle was constructed, at least in part, on the basis of this settled assumption. The type of paper that forces readers to read the abstract twice then emerged. A team led by Guorong Zhong from the Chinese Academy of Sciences discovered something unsettling in a 2024 publication in Communications Earth & Environment: the Southern Ocean’s carbon sink…

A certain type of money comes in stealthily and transforms everything. Unlike announcements from Silicon Valley, the $15 million grant that Scripps Institution of Oceanography received earlier this March from the Fund for Science and Technology is not ostentatious. No launch of a product. No response from the stock ticker. Just scientists, a strategy, and access to regions of the planet that most people will never see and, to be honest, have hardly given much thought to. Launched just last year, the Fund for Science and Technology, which is funded by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen’s estate, aims…