Author: Derrick Lester

A group of servers will be quietly bobbing on the open ocean somewhere off the northern Pacific coast later this year, processing requests, storing data, and harnessing the energy of the waves below. There are no complaining neighbors. There is no zoning board to petition. There isn’t a local politician in the way. Only water, calculations, and the specific aspirations of those who are fed up with the land. Things are moving in this direction. To be honest, it’s difficult not to find it both impressive and a little unsettling as you watch it happen. The U.S.-based startup Panthalassa, which…

Watching a fish drift backward through pitch-black Arctic water, curl its tail, hover for sixteen seconds, and then just disappear is subtly disorienting. It doesn’t appear to be survival. It doesn’t appear to be hunting. To be honest, it appears to be a creature that has nowhere to go. That is essentially what researcher Evgeny Podolskiy also believed. He described the behavior of the snailfish with a kind of bewildered affection after watching video taken 853 feet below the surface of Inglefield Bredning, a glacial fjord carved into Greenland’s northwest corner. He said to Discover Magazine, “I don’t want to…

The idea that robots are now constantly monitoring the ocean, a vast, light-starved, pressure-crushed place that most people will never see, is subtly unsettling. Not a single robot. There are hundreds of them. Moving in unison, communicating with one another through acoustic pulses, instantly changing their direction and depth, and producing more marine life data in a single mission than ten years of ship-based research could have. We may be witnessing the biggest change in ocean science since the development of sonar. For many years, tracking marine migration patterns required laborious methods such as tagging individual animals, using acoustic buoys,…

Right now, there’s something subtly unnerving about the ocean. On the surface, it still appears to be as big and uncaring as it has always been, taking in the chaos of the pollutants that people have been releasing into the atmosphere for more than a century. However, there is a change occurring beneath the surface. To be honest, the picture that scientists are starting to piece together should make everyone a little uneasy. In a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the University of Rochester discovered a hitherto unidentified mechanism that drives…

At some point, approximately 3,000 meters below the surface, the ocean becomes harsh instead of poetic. There is hundreds of times more pressure outside than there would be on a beach. It’s not just visually dark; it’s physically dark. And it’s cold—a constant, bone-deep cold that doesn’t let up, not a crisp morning cold. It’s the type of environment that ruins things. Ambitions, materials, and electronics. The majority of batteries are unreliable. Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have been quietly working on that issue, and it appears that they may have made progress. A new generation of…

Not only are storms getting stronger due to warming sea surfaces, but they are also prolonging the time that they can cause significant harm. Additionally, the affected coastlines are unprepared. You can see newly poured concrete, rebuilt homes, and the cautious optimism that follows disaster when you stand on the shore in Fort Myers Beach today. However, there is a different kind of understanding at work when you speak with the elderly residents, who have survived several storms and witnessed their neighborhoods being completely redrawn by water. Almost instinctively, they will tell you that the storms feel different now. longer.…

The tracks of a research ship from the late 1970s can still be seen somewhere on the Pacific Ocean floor, between Hawaii and Mexico. There hasn’t been a hurricane down there. There was not enough current to destroy what remained. A silent monument to something that people are only now starting to fully comprehend—just sediment that has been disturbed once and frozen in that state for decades. Deep-sea mining and seafloor dredging have long occupied the unsettling gray area where environmental uncertainty and industrial appetite collide. The justifications have been essentially the same for years: the ocean is vast, communities…

The ocean floor resembles a golf driving range somewhere between California and Hawaii, thousands of meters below the surface where sunlight has never reached. If the golf balls happened to contain nickel, cobalt, manganese, and copper in amounts that could alter global supply chains, that is. These are tiny, dark, potato-shaped polymetallic nodules that have been gradually building up on the seafloor for tens of millions of years. Additionally, they are currently at the epicenter of one of the decade’s most significant and underreported geopolitical struggles. The area in question is known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, or CCZ. It is…

There is nothing noteworthy about the road into Pocasset, Massachusetts. The smell of salt air off Buzzards Bay, a strip of peaceful business buildings, and the leisurely pace of Cape Cod throughout the year are all present. However, a group of scientists and engineers working in a specially constructed manufacturing facility on Jonathan Bourne Drive has spent more than thirty years creating the tools that enable the world to truly see what’s going on in the ocean. When Falmouth Scientific, Inc. was established in 1989, real-time ocean data collection was mostly theoretical for the majority of the world’s seas. In…

It’s easy to assume that the ocean is acting exactly as it always has when you stand on the edge of Waikiki on a calm morning and watch the waves roll in off the Pacific. The water is heated. The swells show up on time. Some surfers have already left. Nothing seems off. However, something is changing several hundred meters below that serene surface—quietly, steadily, and in ways that won’t remain undetectable for very long. Over the past 20 years, ocean scientists researching the deep current systems surrounding the Hawaiian archipelago have observed a gradual but discernible decrease in circulation…