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…
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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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…
Nobody discusses how slow the response had to be when the Titan submersible went silent on June 18, 2023, somewhere in the darkness above the Titanic wreck. The closest port was 420 nautical miles away from the ship. The search area was about twice as large as Connecticut. The equipment had to be transported by ship and then dragged in lawnmower lines across the water. Four days later, a remotely operated vehicle discovered a debris field. Four days is considered short for a search area by scientists. A team at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the MIT Ocean Science and Engineering…
The fact that the most sophisticated ocean-monitoring technology in the world was essentially based on a design blueprint created during a world war for about eight decades is quietly amazing. For longer than anyone seems to have given it much thought, the iconic yellow hull, the X-shaped mast protruding skyward, and the recognizable silhouette bobbing on open water defined marine observation. Up until now. Recently, a massive orange disc weighing nine tonnes and measuring six meters in diameter settled into the waters off the eastern coast of China’s Shandong province, formally joining the Yellow Sea observation network. The platform, which…
The disparity between our actual knowledge of the ocean and its importance is almost embarrassing. Roughly 71% of the planet is covered by water. Most of the oxygen we breathe comes from it. It supports a global economy valued at well over a trillion dollars and provides food for billions of people. Nevertheless, only 15% of the seafloor has been mapped using contemporary techniques. Human eyes have never seen more than 5%. The ocean is still remarkably obscure for something so essential to life on Earth; in some ways, it is even less understood than the surface of Mars. A…
The salmon run occurs every June. On their way back to the rivers where they were born—the Yukon and the Kuskokwim, streams whose names most Americans couldn’t find on a map—they push north through the chilly Pacific, navigating the slender passes between the Aleutian Islands. It is one of the more traditional rhythms in North American culture. Additionally, witnessing its breakdown in real time is something that is difficult for those who rely on it to translate into policy language or court filings. Charlie Wright spent decades downstream in Tanana after growing up in the Yukon River village of Rampart.…
When a cube of seafloor mud is brought onto a ship’s deck, run through a sieve, and found to contain something no one has ever seen before, it is a strange moment in deep-sea research. It’s not particularly dramatic. It’s silent. It was a spindly, pale creature sitting in a tray of sediment, completely unaffected by the fact that it had just completely disrupted someone’s conception of life on Earth. The scientific community is only now starting to consider the implications of that moment, which has been occurring more frequently lately. Numerous previously unidentified crustacean species have been discovered over…