Author: Derrick Lester

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…

The ocean monitoring network does something that could be regarded as inconsistent each time a large cyclone passes across the Gulf of Mexico. The buoys that are meant to send temperature and wave data from directly beneath the storm become silent. Models rely on this data to forecast how quickly the storm will strengthen before reaching shore. Some people drag their anchors. Seas high enough to overcome their hulls overpower some. Some just cease to function when subjected to wave impacts that they were not intended to withstand. The instruments gathering the data are most likely to malfunction when the…

From the surface, the western Pacific, located about 80 kilometers from the Mussau Trench at the border of the Caroline Plate, appears no different from any other area of open ocean. Water, horizon, the specific shade of blue that the deep ocean adopts when the sky is the only thing to reflect. The seafloor here is located at a distance from the surface that would need hours of descent for any vehicle capable of reaching it, indicating the depth below this specific piece of it. What the crewed Chinese submersible Fendouzhe discovered on the seafloor during that trip was different…

Sometime in the last two years, someone made a chart in a conference room at the Department of Energy in Washington. People who have seen it but haven’t published it publicly have told me about it. Critical mineral supply chains—the routes from ground-level ore to processed material in a battery cell or a jet engine component—were depicted in the graphic, which color-coded the individuals in charge of each step. The chart was primarily one color during the processing phase. By all accounts, the accompanying briefing was depressing. China has long dominated the processing of key minerals and rare earth elements.…

Potato-sized rocks are found on the seafloor in quantities that have drawn significant corporate attention in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a section of the abyssal Pacific floor that is roughly the size of the continental United States and sits between Hawaii and Mexico at depths of four to five kilometers. In the context of electric vehicle battery supply chains and the geopolitical pressure to lessen reliance on Chinese-controlled land-based processing, the rocks—polymetallic nodules—contain nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese in ratios that make them truly intriguing to the minerals industry. For millions of years, they have been sitting there. Four businesses are…

When the first transatlantic telegraph cable was installed in 1858, the speed at which data is carried by a cable approximately the diameter of a garden hose at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere between the coast of Ireland and the eastern shore of the United States, would have been unthinkable. Every second, it handles billions of online requests, financial transactions, encrypted messages, video calls, and everything else that makes up the typical flow of digital life between two continents. The cable is located on the seafloor, mostly unattended, unmonitored, and unprotected by any teeth-like enforcement device. It shares…