Author: Derrick Lester

In engineering, there is a point at which a proof-of-concept ceases to be theoretical and becomes something completely different. Something tangible and significant. That’s essentially what happened in late April when Cellula Robotics, based in Burnaby, British Columbia, announced that its Envoy autonomous underwater vehicle, which was powered solely by a hydrogen fuel cell system, had finished a fully submerged mission covering 2,023 kilometers over 385 continuous hours. Not a single surface. No recuperation. There is no human hand behind the wheel. For comparison, the approximate driving distance between New York and Miami is 2,023 kilometers. However, this vehicle completed…

The ocean has been doing the work for billions of years, long before humans had any idea of climate or thermostats. It absorbs heat, moves it around, releases it gradually, and silently prevents the planet from swinging between extremes. Scientists occasionally find it difficult to explain how life on Earth depends on this system’s ongoing operation because it is so vast and fundamental. The ocean is now displaying indications that even its enormous capacity has limits after decades of absorbing the effects of industrial civilization. The figures are truly astounding. Since the Industrial Revolution, the ocean has absorbed about 90%…

A tiny poisonous snail is going about its ancient business somewhere beneath the coastal waters off Florida, at depths most people will never see and few researchers have thoroughly investigated. It shoots barbed hooks into fish, releases clouds of paralyzing chemistry into cold, dark water, and apparently produces molecules that pharmaceutical scientists are now frantically trying to obtain. The organism is the Asprella lineage of cone snails, and the substances concealed within its venom gland have emerged as one of the more genuinely surprising tales in modern drug research. It’s important to consider how uncommon this circumstance is. For hundreds…

The thought of an ocean having difficulty breathing is subtly unnerving. Over 70% of this planet’s surface is made up of water, and for the majority of human history, its depths seemed limitless—unknowable, yes, but essentially stable. This assumption is currently undergoing an uncomfortable real-time revision. The ocean is losing oxygen more quickly, more deeply, and in more locations than the models predicted, rather than slowly and neatly as some early predictions suggested. For years, the numbers have been increasing. The global ocean has already lost about 2% of its oxygen since the 1960s, which is about twice as much…

Tracking an unmanned, solar-powered boat as it passes Wake Island in the middle of the night, thousands of miles away from anyone who built it, has an almost surreal quality. When Seasats, a San Diego-based maritime company, sent one of its Lightfish autonomous surface vessels from California toward Japan last year, anyone with a browser could watch the entire event in real time. The ship was 350 pounds in weight. It measured twelve feet in length. It traveled over 7,500 miles in 150 days. No human ever set foot on it. The Lightfish can run for months without going back…

The ability of the same cable carrying a video call from London to New York to sense an earthquake occurring thousands of miles away under the correct circumstances is subtly astounding. Not in a symbolic sense. You can actually feel the slight mechanical tremor of a seafloor fault by observing how light behaves. The ocean floor was essentially a blind spot in seismology for many years. Since two thirds of the Earth’s surface is underwater, the equipment required to properly monitor it has always been costly, challenging to use, and prone to loss. There have been repercussions from that observational…

It’s easy to overlook the crisis when standing on the edge of Kachemak Bay in the early morning and observing the fog hovering low over the water. The bay appears old and unconcerned. The water flows in the same manner as before. However, the people whose lives depend on what exists beneath that surface are beginning to sense that something has changed—quietly, chemically, and imperceptibly. America’s coastal oceans are changing chemically. The pH of surface ocean waters has decreased by 0.1 units since the industrial revolution. When you realize that the pH scale is logarithmic, that seemingly innocuous number actually…

At some point in late summer, the North Atlantic just won’t cool down. Sea surface temperatures breaking records, fishermen returning with smaller catches, and coral systems bleaching in areas that had previously appeared to be safe ground have all been occurring with startling regularity. The natural tendency has always been to measure what we can see with buoys and take pictures of the surface using satellites. However, it appears that we have been focusing on the wrong area of the ocean, according to a recent study published in Nature Climate Change. In collaboration with scientists from Portugal and Australia, researchers…

The notion that the most alive places on Earth are also the deepest is subtly unnerving. Not in the same way as a coral reef, which is noisy, vibrant, and competitive, but in the same way that an abandoned building can occasionally feel alive—something is moving inside, but you’re not sure what. The majority of ocean science essentially ends at the hadal trenches. The water column compresses into a type of permanent, pressurized darkness below 6,000 meters. However, things are erratic here. Transparent amphipods, snailfish with skin so thin that their organs are visible, and holothurians that move across sediment…

Finding out that coral colonies older than the Egyptian pyramids have been sitting undisturbed at the bottom of the North Atlantic, just off the coast of Newfoundland, while the entire recorded sweep of human civilization unfolded above them, is somewhat unsettling. After news of what scientists discovered during a joint expedition by Oceana Canada and Fisheries and Oceans Canada last year—organisms that have been growing steadily and slowly for about 4,500 years—came to mind. During two 21-day sea voyages in July and October of 2025, the expedition explored 1,300-meter-deep submarine canyons along the Southern Newfoundland Slope. Until recently, Canada’s scientific…