The idea that a supply of metals that the modern world sorely needs is hidden beneath thousands of meters of icy, dark water, somewhere beneath any nation’s reach or claim, has an almost mythological quality. copper, nickel, manganese, and cobalt. Everyone keeps promising the green transition, renewable infrastructure, and the raw materials used to make electric batteries. It sounds like a fabrication to support a bold wager. And it is in a lot of ways. The current state of deep-sea mining is peculiar. For years, the UN-established International Seabed Authority, which is in charge of overseeing what is legally referred…
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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The discovery of PCBs at a depth of almost eleven thousand meters below the ocean’s surface is extremely unsettling. Legally, structurally, and institutionally unsettling in a way that the environmental law community has only just started to address, rather than philosophically unsettling, though that is also the case. In June 2017, Chinese researchers on board the R/V Tansuo Yihao collected sediment samples from the southern Mariana Trench without the intention of engaging in a legal dispute. However, that’s basically what they discovered. The polychlorinated biphenyl concentrations found in those samples, which ranged from 931 to more than 4,000 picograms per…
The science ceases to feel abstract at a certain point, somewhere between the hum of the ship and the icy quiet of deep water. The meticulous process of mapping the Mariana Trench has been compared to “mowing the lawn” by James Gardner, a research professor at the University of New Hampshire’s Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping. One meticulous strip at a time, overlapping sonar tracks are laid across thousands of square kilometers of seafloor. It sounds almost normal. It is not at all like that. Near Guam, the Mariana Trench is located about seven miles below the surface of…
The thought that millions of years of animal life have been developing on the ocean floor—whole migrations, entire generations, evolutionary journeys of astounding distance—and we have virtually no knowledge of it is almost unsettling. Not because researchers weren’t searching. However, searching the deep ocean is actually one of the most difficult tasks that people have ever attempted. Few people outside of the marine science community seem to have noticed that this is starting to change. For the past two years, researchers working in isolated areas of the U.S. Pacific have been gathering seawater and extracting species from it—a task that…
Standing at the ocean’s edge and knowing that the world’s largest heat store is located just beneath its shimmering surface—quiet, ancient, and uncaring—is almost unsettling. You can’t tap a battery. It is not a drainable reservoir. Just energy trapped in water, growing silently for decades, and now, in 2025, reaching a point that has truly unnerved researchers. The figures from the international ocean study this year don’t quite make sense. The world’s oceans absorbed 23 zettajoules of heat in 2025 alone. That’s 23 followed by 21 zeroes, or about 37 years of all the energy that humans currently consume in…
The notion that the solution to one of the dirtiest issues in technology may be hidden at the bottom of the ocean has an almost poetic quality. Between 240 and 340 terawatt hours of electricity are used annually by data centers, those enormous, humming warehouses that power everything from hospital diagnostic software to your morning Spotify playlist. It’s not a rounding error. That’s about the yearly energy consumption of a number of mid-sized nations, and a large portion of it is used for one routine but costly task: keeping machines cool. Engineers were therefore keeping a close eye on Microsoft…
The number 0.001 percent has a subtle humble quality. The percentage of Earth’s deep seafloor that humans have ever seen up close is the kind of number that takes some time to come to terms with. Not detected by sonar from a research vessel’s hull, not mapped by satellite, but truly observed by cameras or human eyes. a region about the size of Rhode Island. That figure feels more like an admission than a data point on a planet that is 71% ocean and 90% deep sea. In May 2025, a study that was published in Science Advances made this…
Finding out that industrial fishing fleets operating in near-total obscurity are methodically scraping the ocean floor—a location that most of us will never see, photograph, or visit—is almost surreal. Not in a single place. Everywhere. Weighted nets sinking hundreds of meters through chilly, dark water drag about the area of a football field clean every second of every day. Coral formations that existed before the Roman Empire are being reduced to gravel in a matter of minutes somewhere down there. Deepwater bottom trawling has been referred to by marine scientists as the “clear-cutting of the ocean,” a comparison that seems…
A threat that is invisible has a profoundly unsettling quality. The surface of the Arctic Ocean is the same as it has always been: vast, cold, and gray. However, something has been subtly altering for years a few hundred feet below, along the shallow continental shelf north of Siberia. Methane is starting to leak from ice-like crystalline structures known as hydrates or clathrates, where it has been trapped for millennia. Scientists on research vessels have observed columns of gas bubbles rising through the water column like slow-motion warning signals, but not dramatically or in a single catastrophic event just yet.…
Observing a color vanish from the world’s oceans has a subtle, unsettling quality. Only satellite sensors and deep learning algorithms tracking decades’ worth of chlorophyll data across millions of square miles of open water can measure it in fractions rather than dramatically or all at once. The greenery of the oceans is diminishing. Furthermore, the ramifications of that one sentence go well beyond what would fit neatly into a news cycle. Between 50 and 80 percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere is produced by microscopic, mostly invisible phytoplankton, which is in decline. A seminal study that monitored chlorophyll concentrations…