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…
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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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…
The idea of extracting gold and copper from the ocean floor, thousands of meters below the surface, in water so dark and pressurized that even the machinery must be specifically imagined into existence, has an almost mythological quality. For years, the Canadian company Nautilus Minerals Inc. insisted that this was a near-future industrial reality rather than a fantasy, and they built their entire corporate identity around that image. And Papua New Guinea believed them for a long, costly, and painful period of time. Targeting hydrothermal vents that contained copper, gold, silver, and zinc, the Solwara 1 project was located 1.6…
When a weather satellite silently drifted in geostationary orbit over the Western Hemisphere early on June 2, it detected something that caused meteorologists to pause mid-scroll. Houston was covered in long, narrow cloud bands that did not follow rivers or topographical features in the image taken by NOAA’s GOES East satellite, formerly known as GOES-19. They were traveling along the roads. Many of the drivers under that sky might not have known what was developing above them. On a typical weekday, commuters in Houston were moving slowly along I-10, crossing the 610 Loop, and merging onto US-59. Additionally, the concrete…
A subtle but significant announcement made its way through the financial news on May 28, 2026: NOAA had officially certified The Metals Company’s exploration license application for USA B, a region of the Pacific seafloor that is roughly 122,000 square kilometers in size. It is located somewhere between Hawaii and Mexico and is covered in potato-sized mineral formations that have been accumulating undisturbed for millions of years. It wasn’t a license to mine. However, it was the most obvious indication to date that the US government is actually willing to allow someone to try. On May 28, 2026, TMC announced…
The majority of people will never see or consider the world beneath the Pacific Ocean, and until recently, science itself hardly acknowledged its existence. It starts about 650 feet below the surface, where sunlight silently fades away. Below that barrier, bizarre creatures float through almost complete darkness: translucent beings with massive eyes, bioluminescent organisms that pulse softly like broken streetlights, and species so new to science that they haven’t even been given names yet. This is the midwater zone, which is half twilight and half midnight, and it is currently in the direct line of an industry that is interested…
Farmers throughout the Lake Erie basin begin observing the sky in a different way every June, somewhere between the spreadsheets and the soil reports. Rain is a part of it, but it’s not for the rain itself; rather, it’s for the things that rain brings. the nutrient-rich runoff that empties into rivers, tributaries, and the lake itself after leaving fertilized cornfields. what nourishes the blooms. At a media briefing held at Ohio State’s Stone Laboratory on South Bass Island on June 25, NOAA will present its 2026 forecast for Lake Erie’s harmful algal blooms. The location is only accessible by…