Author: Derrick Lester

Somewhere off the coast of Western Australia, in the middle of the night, when the ocean beneath you is almost three miles deep and full of things that have never seen light, a certain silence descends upon a research vessel. Standing on that deck, it’s difficult not to feel like an intruder. It’s as if you knocked on a door that wasn’t supposed to be opened. Apparently, that door leads to something remarkable. The results of an expedition into the Cape Range and Cloates submarine canyons, which run north of Perth close to the Ningaloo coastline—a region of ocean most…

A research ship will sail from the Oregon coast into the gray-green waters of the northeastern Pacific sometime in the middle of June. A buoy that is 80 meters below the surface will be found, hauled up, and returned to shore by the crew. It sounds almost like a routine part. It isn’t. That buoy is a component of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a network of over 900 sensors located in five ocean regions that was constructed over the course of more than ten years of planning, funded with $386 million, and intended to operate continuously for 25 to 30…

Standing at the edge of a research vessel in the Gulf and knowing that the water below you, stretching down through darkening shades of blue into complete murk, is, by all conventional wisdom, incompatible with life, is a subtly unsettling experience. These areas were dubbed “dead zones” by scientists. It felt like the right name. earned. And no one had much reason to doubt it for decades. Most likely, they ought to have questioned it earlier. A once-settled picture is being complicated by recent findings from researchers studying hypoxic zones, which are areas where dissolved oxygen drops to two milligrams…

The humidity in Kingston, Jamaica, is somewhat constant. For the better part of eight years, diplomats and business representatives have been working inside the International Seabed Authority’s headquarters to reach a consensus on regulations pertaining to deep ocean floor mining. The Caribbean moves apathetically outside. It’s an odd setting for what is quietly turning into one of the extractive industry’s more significant financial standoffs. However, Kingston is not the site of the standoff. In the boardrooms of Zurich, Hannover, and Vienna, some of the most influential insurers in the world have begun to do something out of the ordinary: abandoning…

When you read a study that claims something irreversible has already occurred, you feel a certain kind of dread. Not “may happen by 2050.” Not “could happen.” Already occurred. According to recent research from the University of Edinburgh, which monitored chemical changes in Arctic waters over a 20-year period, the ocean ecosystem seems to have reached a tipping point sometime around 2009. Silently. without any headlines. The majority of people on the planet were viewing something else. The offender isn’t as dramatic as we’ve come to anticipate from stories about climate change. No one catastrophic incident. No obvious flood or…

Trillions of fist-sized rocks are sitting somewhere between Mexico and Hawaii, at depths where sunlight has never reached and pressure would crush most machinery flat. Over millions of years, they gradually accumulated around shark teeth and pieces of shell, forming the minerals that power consumer electronics and electric car batteries today. They sat quietly for a long time. That might not go on for very long. One of the biggest financial bets on the future of deep-sea mining to date is the announced merger of American Ocean Minerals Corporation and Odyssey Marine Exploration, which is valued at about $1 billion.…

A ship that refuses to be located has a subtly unsettling quality. It cuts its transponder somewhere beyond the horizon, sails under a flag it didn’t earn, and carries insurance documents that don’t stand up to scrutiny. When an oil spill occurs or a cable breaks, the world takes notice for a moment before forgetting once more. However, there is another aspect of this story that has gone mostly unnoticed: an increasing number of these unregulated vessels are transporting more than just crude oil. They are collecting information. mapping the bottom of the deep ocean. methodically, systematically, and entirely outside…

Standing on a Gulf Coast beach in late summer and feeling water that should be refreshing but isn’t has a subtly unsettling quality. It’s warm in a way that doesn’t feel natural; it’s not warm like a pool left in the sun, but rather warm in a way that feels enduring, as if something has fundamentally changed beneath the surface. Scientists have the data to support that intuition. The Gulf of Mexico’s sea surface temperature rose by about 1.0°C between 1970 and 2020, or roughly 0.19°C every ten years, according to a study published in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal…

Seeing a carcass turn into a city has an almost philosophical quality. Since the early 2000s, a gray whale has been slowly disintegrating off the coast of Vancouver Island at a depth of 1,288 meters where sunlight has long since given up. Scientists have been methodically observing with remotely operated cameras and growing astonishment. Ocean Networks Canada is currently in charge of the project, which has been actively monitored for fifteen years. After years of decomposition, the whale was discovered for the first time in 2009. It was found again in 2012, 2020, 2023, and 2024. These cameras have returned…

The fact that one of the most important conflicts over the world’s food supply is taking place somewhere above the clouds rather than on the water is subtly amazing. Satellites fly overhead in silence. Radar imagery is churned by algorithms. And somewhere in the Pacific or off the coast of West Africa, a government analyst’s screen abruptly displays a fishing vessel operating in the dark with no broadcast signal, no transponder, and no intention of being located. This is how the U.S. Coast Guard actually uses xView3. The Defense Innovation Unit and the nonprofit Global Fishing Watch worked together to…