Author: Derrick Lester

The Mariana Trench has a subtle, unnerving quality. With 36,000 feet of total darkness, cold that can numb any instrument, and pressure that would crush an automobile into a tin box, it sits in the northwest Pacific like a wound in the earth’s crust. For a very long time, scientists and the general public believed that whatever occurred down there happened according to its own rules. secluded. unaltered. beyond the scope of any surface-level action we could take. It turns out that assumption was incorrect. Not just a little off. Essentially incorrect. Fish and crustaceans that live at the bottom…

The idea of a worm constructing a home inside a glass skeleton seven kilometers below the Pacific Ocean’s surface, in complete darkness and under pressure that would crush an unprotected human body in less than a second, seems almost ridiculous. However, when the Shinkai 6500 submersible surfaced last June with specimens that halted taxonomists in their tracks, researchers on board the JAMSTEC research vessel Yokosuka discovered precisely that. The hollow lattice of a hexactinellid sponge, which scientists sometimes refer to as a “glass sponge,” was home to two new polychaete worm species, now known as Dalhousiella yabukii and Leocratides watanabeae.…

Watching a nation sit on what could be one of the century’s most important resource discoveries and move—not slowly, but haltingly—is subtly annoying. All the components of a scientific and geopolitical breakthrough are present in India’s Deep Ocean Mission, which was announced with great fanfare at the Indian Science Congress in Tirupati back in 2017. a designated area in the Central Indian Ocean Basin of 75,000 square kilometers. A hundred years’ worth of energy in polymetallic nodules. a 2.37 million square kilometer Exclusive Economic Zone. However, there is a recurring feeling that the mission is circling the runway without actually…

Three thousand meters below the Pacific’s surface, something went wrong, and no one is quite sure what that means yet. Officials are referring to this as the first major technical failure of the deep-sea mining pilot program operating off the U.S. West Coast, which was intended to rewrite the rules on how America sources its essential minerals. Under circumstances that engineers had apparently underestimated, equipment intended to gather potato-shaped polymetallic nodules—tiny rocks that take millions of years to form—from the ocean floor malfunctioned. Both policy offices and engineering rooms are still debating whether this is a warning shot or a…

It takes a moment to realize that something is wrong with the water when you stand on a dock in Gloucester, Massachusetts on a calm June morning. Not dramatically incorrect, not a disastrous film. It’s just a little too calm, a little too warm, and a little too clear where it shouldn’t be. Local fishermen who have been working these waters for decades are also observing it, and some of them are picking their words carefully when discussing it, as if putting it simply might make it seem more real. By most accounts, what is currently taking place off the…

Billions of potato-sized rocks are dispersed over a large underwater plateau called the Clarion Clipperton Zone, several kilometers below the Pacific Ocean’s surface. They appear unremarkable. However, each one contains cobalt, nickel, manganese, and copper—the very elements that battery producers and manufacturers of electric vehicles are secretly clamoring for. A green future is what the world desires. One of the more practical ways to get there could be through these nodules. Additionally, a legal dispute over who gets to pick them up is currently developing covertly into something that has the potential to change international law. It’s difficult to ignore…

When you stand on Stonington’s dock early in July, you can see the weathered boats leaving the harbor before most people have had their first cup of coffee. The bait is inserted, the trap lines are lowered, and somewhere beneath the greenish-gray water, Maine’s most valuable animal travels along the ocean floor, oblivious to its surroundings. The lobster is unable to detect the warming of the surrounding water. But for years, the lobstermen have been aware of this. Approximately 99 percent of the world’s oceans are not warming as quickly as the Gulf of Maine. That is a documented trend…

Observing the ocean’s color change has a subtle, unsettling quality. It wasn’t a dramatic overnight change, nor was it particularly noticeable. Instruments orbiting hundreds of kilometers above the water record the slow process, which is measured in light wavelengths. Nevertheless, Stephanie Dutkiewicz at MIT did not feel relieved to be proven correct when she examined what the satellites had been telling her for years. She described it as frightening. Approximately 36% of the world’s open ocean, or an area close to 122 million square kilometers, has seen discernible color changes, according to data collected between 1998 and 2022. What was…

A colony of Porites lobata coral was quietly building itself, ring by ring, year by year, and absorbing the chemistry of the surrounding water off the northeastern tip of the Philippines, close to the point where the Kuroshio Current bends westward and presses into the South China Sea. No one was observing. No one was taking measurements. However, the record was being maintained. Because of this, the results that were published in Science Advances last February seem to be more than just a significant scientific achievement. The ocean seems to have finally given up its own journal. Drilling a core…

There is something quietly unsettling about the fact that between 30 and 60 percent of marine life has never been formally described by science. Not because the animals don’t exist — they do, in extraordinary numbers — but because getting to them, collecting them intact, and transporting their fragile bodies to the surface has always been the problem. The deep ocean is not cooperative. It is cold, pressurized, and dark, and the things that live there are often so delicate that the act of collecting them destroys precisely what you were trying to study. That tension has sat at the…