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…
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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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…
A former Australian prime minister staking his post-office reputation on what lies beneath the ocean has an almost poetic, if slightly unsettling, quality. Australia’s 2018–2022 governor, Scott Morrison, has quietly accepted a position as a strategic adviser at the recently established Seafloor Minerals Fund, a company that is positioning itself at the edge of one of the world’s most contentious resource frontiers. Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is seated next to him in an advisory role. Before you even get to the actual mining, this pairing raises questions. The fund is associated with DYNE Asset Management, a venture…
Japan’s deep-sea drilling ship Chikyū sneaked out of Shimizu Port in Shizuoka prefecture on a gloomy January morning and headed southeast toward a tiny, sparsely populated island that most Japanese couldn’t find on a map. After arriving at Minami-Torishima five days later and traveling about 1,900 kilometers, it continued, in a sense, all the way to the ocean floor, which is almost six kilometers below the surface. What emerged was a dense, clay-like mud that contained rare earth elements that are essential to the global clean energy, electronics, and defense sectors. During a mission that ended in early February 2026,…
At Darwin Island, one of the world’s most isolated dive sites, about 600 miles off the coast of mainland Ecuador, something subtly remarkable is taking place. Three times a day, a team of researchers descends on a scuba dive, lands on a platform made of submerged rock, and waits. They are pulled by powerful currents. Visibility changes. Then, out of nowhere, a 12-meter whale shark appears out of nowhere. It is massive, leisurely, and doesn’t seem to realize how uncommon it is. It’s not just awe that follows. Science is involved. In particular, it’s a photograph, and it might be…
When the topic of Arctic drilling comes up again, a certain silence falls over the conversation. A pause. a slight tightening of the eye area. Those who witnessed the Kulluk run aground on live television in December 2012 after its towline snapped in choppy Alaskan water, and who witnessed Shell spend seven billion dollars and come away empty-handed, often carry that memory with them. The oil industry has a tendency to appear overconfident in the Arctic. And yet, here we are once more. Once again, oil companies are pushing into waters at the northern edge of Alaska’s already heavily industrialized…
The idea of vast, frigid Alaskan waters, kelp swaying in the current, and oyster beds silently growing beneath fishing boats that have worked those same stretches of ocean for generations has an almost cinematic quality. An atlas identifying 77 sites in the Gulf of Alaska that might be appropriate for commercial shellfish and seaweed aquaculture was recently released by NOAA Fisheries. It seems like a wise policy on paper. It sounds more complicated than that on the docks. Technically speaking, the atlas is a planning document rather than a final designation. It was created by NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal…