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…
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.
Read More
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…
You wouldn’t notice them right away if you were standing at the edge of Port-La Nouvelle on a bright May morning, gazing south toward the Mediterranean. They are sixteen kilometers away, beyond the gentle haze of the horizon. However, somewhere out there, three enormous turbines are spinning on platforms that are not in contact with the seafloor; they are suspended, anchored, and producing electricity from winds that travel freely over one of Europe’s most difficult expanses of open water. The world’s first fully operational floating offshore wind farm in truly deep Mediterranean waters was just completed by France, quietly and…
Stand at the old port in Mombasa on a clear morning and you can watch the dhows come in — wooden, hand-painted, some of them older than their captains. They return with modest catches, the kind that feed families and fill local markets but don’t register on global trade charts. A few kilometres offshore, in deeper, richer water, foreign-flagged vessels are doing something entirely different. They’re hauling tuna by the tonne, working an ocean that, technically, belongs to Kenya. That image — the weathered dhow and the industrial trawler — captures the entire problem with Kenya’s fishing economy. The country…
A ship coming back from the deep has an almost cinematic quality. The Chinese Geological Survey didn’t take long to announce what was on board the Haiyang Dizhi-6, also known as Ocean Geology-6, when it docked following its sixteenth deep-sea geological survey expedition last week. Ninety kilograms of basalt. polymetallic nodules that are abundant. and information gathered from the western Pacific’s depth of almost 7,800 meters. The outcomes are remarkable for a mission that the majority of the world hardly knew was taking place. In order to extract as much information as possible from one of the planet’s least understood…
The idea that the ancient, legendary, fishing, and sailing Mediterranean Sea now conceals, somewhere beneath its dark surface, a machine designed to address the most fundamental question science has ever asked: why is there something rather than nothing? There is something subtly remarkable about this idea. A kilometer or so below the surface of the ocean, vertical strings of basketball-sized glass spheres extend upward into the chilly water like an unearthly forest. Europe’s deep-sea neutrino telescope, KM3NeT, is listening for signals from the violent periphery of the universe. It hunts particles known as neutrinos, which are nearly impossible to identify.…
The water in a section of the western Gulf of Alaska appears almost too normal, with grey-blue swells, chilly air, and the occasional seabird. Nothing on the surface indicates that creatures you could hardly see with the unaided eye are deciding the fate of Alaska’s multibillion-dollar fishing industry somewhere beneath it. Each year, NOAA biologists board research boats and spend weeks out there skimming water samples in search of fish so small they are mostly translucent, such as Pacific cod, sablefish, flatfish, and larval walleye pollock. It’s laborious work. And according to the scientists conducting it, it might be some…