Author: Derrick Lester

The summertime water temperature in the area between Point Conception and Point Arena off the coast of central California provides some insight into how well the wind has been working. The water close to the coast runs cold and dark green when it has—when powerful northerly winds have forced surface water offshore for weeks at a time. Phytoplankton is that color. Feeding on nutrients drawn up from depth by the upwelling process, billions of microscopic organisms bloom in concentrations dense enough to dye the water. The chlorophyll signal is so powerful that it appears from orbit as bright green streaks…

A Dumbo octopus floats by the camera of a remotely operated vehicle at about 3,000 meters below the Pacific Ocean’s surface, where the water pressure is around 300 times higher than it is at sea level and no sunlight has reached in geological timeframes. The video, which was taken by MBARI researchers off the coast of California, depicts an animal that swims quietly and efficiently. Its body is semi-translucent against the black water, and its two ear-like fins undulate in a rhythmic pattern. The skin appears to change under the lights of the submersible. Something shifts when it comes into…

Sunlight has been reduced to something hardly worth calling light at all at a depth of around 600 meters below the ocean’s surface. It is a weak, diffuse blue wash that comes from above and is so dim that it would appear to human eyes to be almost completely dark. The mesopelagic zone, often known as the twilight zone, is one of the most unusual locations on Earth where life has established itself. There is a great deal of pressure. There’s not enough food. Nevertheless, millions of tiny fish move through this ecosystem on a daily basis, and some of…

By most standards, obtaining a physical core sample from the deep ocean below is an amazing task. While a coring device descends several kilometers in water that gets colder, darker, and more pressured with each meter, a research vessel maintains position over an abyssal plain. The entire process may require more than a day. On a seafloor that makes up about 70% of the earth, the resulting core, a cylinder of sediment that may be a meter long, represents a tiny geographic pinpoint. The resulting science is genuine and worthwhile. In comparison to the space between sampling locations, the coverage…

In June 2026, a team from the Institute of Oceanology unveiled an AI model that they characterize as “crossing a line” in a research building in Qingdao, which overlooks a section of the Yellow Sea that has nourished Chinese maritime culture for millennia. This is a technical line, not a promotional one. The initial LangYa system could provide you with information about the ocean’s condition, including salinity distributions, temperature gradients, and general descriptions of the sea’s appearance both now and tomorrow. The purpose of LangYa 2.0 is to predict what the ocean will do. It sounds like a small difference.…

Off the coast of St. Croix, there is a wall that descends from a reef flat in roughly fifteen meters of water to a location that is unreachable by any diver who has ever gone down it. Coral species, fish groups, and the ecology of what scientists refer to as the mesophotic zone—the twilight band between recreational divers’ halt and the point at which light completely disappears—are all very well described in the higher sections. The wall extends below that. With specialized diving equipment, you may still follow it for a while. After that, it travels to a location that…

In ocean science, sixty years is a long time. Long enough, it turns out, to observe changes in the deep sea that the scientists who first monitored it in the 1960s would not have anticipated. Teams from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, France’s Mercator Ocean International, and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris collaborated on a study published in Nature Climate Change that accomplished something that oceanographers have been working toward for decades: it integrated several ocean variables into a single monitoring framework and systematically asked how much has actually changed since we started paying close attention. The response exceeds…

For many years, meteorologists relied on the following rule: hurricanes do not survive when vertical wind shear is significant. The structured structure that a storm requires to intensify is destroyed by wind shear, which is the variation in wind direction and speed at different altitudes. The engine is knocked out of alignment. Florida International University research professor Hugh Willoughby put it simply: “Shear is death for hurricanes.” He described Hurricane Lee’s formation in September 2023, during an El Niño year that should have created precisely this type of adverse shear environment, as “a nasty surprise.” The mechanism that was supposed…

There is a layer in the Eastern Tropical Pacific where the water’s oxygen content drops to the point where most fish cannot survive, generally between the surface and 700 meters below the surface. The layer has existed for many years; beginning in the middle of the 20th century, oceanographers identified and charted oxygen minimum zones, treating them as stable, rather unusual aspects of deep-ocean chemistry. They weren’t growing very quickly. They weren’t regarded as an urgent ecological emergency. They were a component of the ocean’s background state, found in some basins, significant to scientists researching ocean biogeochemistry, and mostly undetectable…

Restoration crews are working in settings most people don’t identify with post-fire recovery along the Malibu shoreline, where flames have burnt the cliffs and runoff from burned slopes has drowned kelp holdfasts in the shallow sea below. The shore was not the end of the fire destruction. It continued to enter the ocean as trash flows and sediment pulses that covered the rocky substrate where kelp grows and adheres. Restoring the physical conditions necessary for kelp to anchor and thrive is more important for rebuilding those forests than simply planting kelp. Time, consistent funding, and scientific collaboration are necessary for…