Author: Derrick Lester

The idea that, somewhere beneath the North Atlantic, instruments that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to deploy and took years to engineer are now being pulled up and shipped to shore—not because they stopped working, but because someone in Washington decided they should—is subtly disorienting. The Ocean Observatories Initiative, a network of over 900 deep-sea instruments dispersed across five arrays in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, was “descoped,” according to a May announcement from the National Science Foundation. Since 2016, the system, which cost about $368 million to construct and $48 million annually to maintain, has been operating nonstop.…

Before foot traffic picks up along the waterfront and the Navy ships start their steady movements across the harbor, a certain kind of silence descends over San Diego Bay in the early morning. If you’re paying attention, you might spot something strange in that silence: a low-slung, unmanned craft moving through the water without a pilot. Not a crew. Not a sound. Only the machine and the mission. It’s more difficult to fully explain what’s happening along this section of California coastline than it is to observe. Silently, San Diego has emerged as the epicenter of one of the most…

A certain type of discovery doesn’t come with an abrupt flash on the sonar screen or a dramatic instrument alarm. Occasionally, it appears gradually, either as noise in the data or as geological features that scientists have previously identified a hundred times. One of those seems to have been the hydrothermal field beneath the Bering Sea, which was active, present, and largely overlooked by the historical record until someone chose to take a closer look. While on a research expedition, Jonas Preine noticed that the data began to suggest something unexpected. Researchers have been studying the seafloor between diverging tectonic…

The erosion is evident when you stand on the coast at Utqiańvik, the former Barrow, the northernmost city of Alaska, where the Arctic Ocean meets the edge of the continent and the permafrost is so deep that structures must be built around it. not as a graph’s abstract trend. as a moving edge. The land beneath their original foundations is melting into the Beaufort Sea in pieces of frozen earth that break away from the coastline and melt into the ocean; houses that were fifty meters from the shore ten years ago are now closer, some of which have already…

Currently, there is a ship somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean that is 110 meters long, carrying up to 40 scientists and crew members. It is trailing a fiber-optic tether connected to a remotely operated vehicle called SuBastian, which is likely hovering over a portion of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that no camera has ever reached. The name painted on the ship’s hull is the only thing about it that makes people take a second look when they see it for the first time. Falkor R/V (also). The Luckdragon from Michael Ende’s 1979 book The Neverending Story inspired the name. Not after…

A volcano the size of a small city is located about 300 miles off the coast of Oregon, at a depth where the pressure is about 140 times what you’d feel standing at sea level and no sunlight has penetrated since the ocean formed. It erupts roughly every ten years, reshaping miles of seafloor and supporting a thriving ecosystem of creatures that, according to most conventional biological logic, shouldn’t exist. The most active volcano in the northeast Pacific is Axial Seamount. In 1998, it erupted. In 2011, it erupted once more. When it erupted in 2015, the seafloor monitoring devices…

The ocean floor is dotted with items that appear to be potatoes from a distance on the abyssal plain between Hawaii and Mexico. This area of the Pacific is so far away that it receives only the tiniest trickle of biological material sinking from the surface waters four to six kilometers above. As the water above them cycles through ice ages, interglacial periods, and the entire industrial history of human civilization, these polymetallic nodules—accretions of manganese and iron oxides—form around a piece of shell or shark tooth over millions of years. They grow at a rate of a few millimeters…

The harbor at Moss Landing, California, a tiny fishing and research village tucked between Monterey Bay and the Elkhorn Slough wetlands, is not very striking. The R/V David Packard appears more industrial than exploratory, the kind of vessel that emphasizes patient work rather than adventure, as it rests at its dock next to commercial fishing boats. A few hundred meters away, engineers and biologists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute are accomplishing something that oceanographic organizations with much larger budgets and more well-known names haven’t been able to do: they are methodically mapping the deep ocean at scale, discovering…

The ocean is everywhere when you stand in Pago Pago Harbor on a clear morning. The water is so blue it almost seems unreal, fishing boats are tied along the docks, and Tutuila’s green volcanic ridges rise behind the town in a way that gives the impression that the island was created to impress. It is the main reality of this location. It provides food, establishes the calendar, and bears the cultural significance that land could have in other communities. Under the more general heading of Fa’asamoa, or the Samoan way, the relationship between Samoan communities and the ocean is…

Layers of mud are building up at a pace of about a millimeter per year somewhere beneath the warm blue-green water of the Gulf of Mexico, a few thousand meters below the surface, in the never-ending darkness where no sunshine has ever reached. This is something they have been doing for a very long time. The shells of microscopic organisms known as foraminifera, whose chemical makeup records the temperature of the water they inhabited, plant matter carrying isotopic signatures of rainfall and river runoff from the nearby land, and coarser sediment layers that were abruptly deposited when a hurricane passed…