individuals’s reactions to sea level rise differ from those of individuals who live inland along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast in areas where the road to the closest grocery store already floods on a typical high tide without any storm in sight. To them, it’s not abstract. It’s the water seeping under the back door in October, the sandbags that are now a permanent feature in garages, and the school system that subtly rearranged the schedule to avoid the twice-weekly flooding on the access road. The NOAA and NASA Sea Level Rise Technical Report quantifies the difficulties these communities are presently facing…
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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There are models in the offices where federal climate policy is formulated, such as the EPA’s regulatory shop, the interagency groups that determine emissions targets and compute societal costs, and the budget offices that assess the costs of doing nothing. The models provide analysts with information on the amount of warming that a particular level of atmospheric CO2 will produce, the economic harm that warming produces, and consequently the cost to society of each additional ton of CO2 entering the atmosphere. From the initial commitment made in the Paris Agreement to the renewable energy provisions of the Infrastructure Investment and…
When a tracked vehicle travels across the abyssal plain during a deep-sea mining operation in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, the surrounding seafloor vanishes into a haze. Sediment that has accumulated over millions of years, layer by layer, gets disturbed by the machinery; this is a material archive of geological time that hasn’t been touched since before any extant creature evolved. The cloud does not remain at the bottom. As the car passes by and the suction systems pick up nodules, fine particles are agitated into suspension and start to drift. They are picked up by ocean currents. And what was once…
About 168 miles southwest of the Louisiana coast, the Orca Basin is located in water deep enough that chemistry and pressure have combined to produce something unique: a layer of brine so rich and oxygen-depleted that virtually nothing can break down in it. In contrast to regular seawater, objects that sink into the Orca Basin do not decompose. Biological and chemical deterioration is slowed to a fraction of its typical rate by the anoxic conditions, which are virtually an oxygen desert at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. For many years, marine scientists have been aware of this and…
Tanks big enough to test underwater vehicles under controlled conditions that mimic the physical demands of the ocean are located within a facility on the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus in Baltimore. In order to simulate real operating environments, engineers lower instrumented robots into these indoor pools, run navigation algorithms through scenarios, and observe what happens when the software encounters the kinds of disturbances that real ocean deployments produce, such as shifting currents, unexpected physical contact, and sensor noise. The difference between a promising algorithm and a deployable system is measured in real data at this unglamorous activity, which involves repeating…
Engineers have been working on a seemingly straightforward project at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on a dock that has seen more oceanographic equipment deployed and recovered than most people will see in a lifetime: retrieving information in real time from the deep ocean. The problem is that the majority of people’s go-to resources for wireless data transmission—cellular frequencies, radio signals, and the electromagnetic spectrum in all of its practical forms—stop functioning as soon as they come into contact with saltwater. nor gradually, nor with a decline in performance. Within meters of the surface, they perish. For practical…
Bonga Southwest-Aparo appeared to be precisely the kind of project that would define Nigeria’s offshore future during the years when deepwater oil was still a relatively new technology and the Gulf of Guinea was being discussed as West Africa’s North Sea substitute. There is a reservoir. The resource is available. Shell has been aware of it for decades, and although the engineering hurdles are substantial, they are manageable when compared to other successful projects in the sector. The political and financial climate around the project was unmanageable for a very long period. As a result, billions of dollars’ worth of…
During a test operation, a tracked vehicle traversed the seafloor in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which is located between Hawaii and Mexico on an abyssal plain that is approximately four to five kilometers below the ocean’s surface. The vehicle gathered polymetallic nodules from the mud. The machine performed its intended function. It gathered. It shifted. A trail was left by it. Additionally, compared to the undisturbed material next to the track, the quantity of creatures that had been residing in that 5-centimeter layer of abyssal mud behind it was about 37% lower in the disturbed sediment. This figure—the 37% decrease in…
Engineers are addressing a supply chain limitation that appears in their procurement paperwork as a flag on specific rare earth magnet components in the basement of a defense contractor’s Virginia plant. The actual magnets are tiny. They don’t serve that purpose. The U.S. military relies on them for guidance systems, radar components, and communications technology, and China provides the majority of the refined material needed to make them function. For years, this has been the case. The flag has been there for many years. The supply chain solution that was meant to fix it is still not entirely functional. China’s…
Ocean heat content is the number you would want if you wanted to understand what the climate has actually been doing over the past century—not what the atmosphere has been doing, not what the land surface temperatures suggest, but the complete accounting of the energy that greenhouse gasses have been trapping in the Earth system. Climate discussions frequently center on surface air temperature records, which are crucial. However, they only record the small layer of the atmosphere that humans occupy. The heat is transferred to the ocean. For more than a century of industrial carbon emissions, it has been quietly…