The ocean has a way of giving you the impression that there are still mysteries in the world. Not abstract ones, but actual, tangible, massive secrets that, if you look at the right time, are sitting right there in the water. That’s essentially what happened in 2025 when a NOAA research team carrying out routine surveys to monitor coral reefs in the Mariana Islands discovered something no one had anticipated: the largest Porites coral colony ever found on Earth. The hunt was not targeted. Nobody took a plane to the isolated Maug Islands in the Mariana archipelago with the intention…
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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When you stroll along Portsmouth Harbor’s docks on a clear morning, you’ll notice a certain kind of activity: students carrying equipment, research vessels being prepared, and the smell of salt from serious work near the water. For more than ten years, the University of New Hampshire has been quietly constructing something here. The federal government has now determined that the work merits a much larger platform. UNH has been chosen to spearhead NOAA’s inaugural Cooperative Institute Fostering Aquaculture Research and Markets, or CIFARM, a $13.5 million, five-year national initiative aimed at radically changing the way the US sources and grows…
According to biologist Jeff Drazen, there was a moment when the camera feeds from five miles below the Pacific revealed an image that no one on board had anticipated seeing. Drazen described this moment with a kind of quiet disbelief. A pale, nearly transparent fish with a scalloped face, wide fins spread out like wings, and a tail that tapered like an eel was floating through complete darkness as though it had been there forever. The group gazed at the screen. It was dubbed the “ghost fish.” The name stuck. The Mariana Trench, a 1,500-mile hole in the Pacific floor…
A Lockheed Martin facility is currently experiencing something quietly significant that most people outside the defense and weather-science industries will never learn about. The California-based satellite communications firm Viasat, which is listed on the NASDAQ as VSAT, has been chosen to supply NOAA’s upcoming C-130J Hurricane Hunter aircraft with high-bandwidth SATCOM technology. It sounds technical. Yes, it is. However, the ramifications go far beyond engineering specifications and procurement documentation. Forecasting hurricanes has always been a time-sensitive numbers game. The difference between a 12-hour-old data model and a real-time one can determine whether or not tens of thousands of people evacuate…
There is a specific type of regulatory change that occurs in Washington that goes unnoticed. It’s not because it’s completely hidden, but rather because it appears as a technical amendment that is discreetly published in the Federal Register on a Tuesday in January under the guise of administrative efficiency. Among these modifications is NOAA’s revision of deep seabed mining regulations. The agency completed changes to the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act permitting framework on January 21, 2026, creating a single application process for both commercial recovery and exploration licenses. It sounds like a procedure. It isn’t. National Oceanic and…
The idea of enormous expanses of ocean floor, miles below the surface, covered in potato-shaped metallic nodules that are just sitting there in the dark has an almost cinematic quality. They are not owned by anyone. They have never been touched commercially. Washington now wants to quickly alter that. President Trump issued an executive order in April 2025 instructing federal agencies to expedite deep-sea mining permits, both within U.S. waters and, more controversially, in international zones where the United States has never formally recognized the governing treaty. Regulators are currently in negotiations with at least nine companies. This summer, portions…
A series of instruments has been quietly counting molecules for years off the coast of Oregon, somewhere beyond the point where the continental shelf disappears into darkness. They gauge the amount of oxygen that remains in the water far below the surface. Season after season, the response has been essentially the same: slightly lower than the previous year. There is a name for that layer. The breathable surface and the cold, oxygen-rich deep are separated by the oxygen minimum zone, or OMZ, which is located between 200 and 1,000 meters below the surface. It has always happened naturally. Its size…
A row of microphones has been listening for almost 70 years somewhere off the coast of California, past the point where the continental shelf plunges into icy black water. None of this was ever intended for them. The Navy’s SOSUS hydrophones, built during the Cold War to detect the slow churn of Soviet submarines, sat on the seafloor, wired back to quiet stations onshore, waiting for the wrong kind of propeller. Instead, they captured the ocean conversing with itself. The operators recorded moans, clicks, deep booms, and long repeating tones that didn’t match anything in their classified catalogs for decades.…
The vents weren’t discovered until the late 1970s, when scientists lowered instruments to the seafloor and saw water spilling out at temperatures that ought to have sterilized everything nearby. Rather, life had gathered there. tube worms as long as an adult man. In complete darkness, under crushing pressure, thick mats of bacteria feed on sulfur and hydrogen rather than sunlight. It changed scientists’ perceptions of what life could endure. The fact that these same organisms, which were designed to withstand environments that would destroy regular cells, were chemically valuable in ways that corporations would eventually compete over was something that…
From above, the Daugava reveals very little. The water is uneven and rusty, the depths changing suddenly, and the surface reveals very little about what is underneath. When most people stand at the mouth of the river close to Riga, they see nothing more than brown water flowing toward the Baltic. The hydrographers at LVR Flote have been reading this puzzle for twenty years. The puzzle gave them something unexpected last summer. A shape that didn’t belong on the screen appeared during what was meant to be a routine survey. Bicycles, fallen trees, broken pieces of breakwater, and the occasional…