A tethered ROV slowly descends toward a pipeline that was last thoroughly inspected maybe two years ago while a crewed vessel idles off the coast for about $100,000 per day. The crew is waiting. The information gradually becomes available. And an analyst somewhere in an Aberdeen or Houston office completes the task, files the report, and moves on. This is the subsea industry in 2025: a massive, vital, almost ridiculously outdated business that everyone wants a piece of. The figures being discussed are astounding. Undersea infrastructure contributes more than $3 trillion to the world economy. Fiber cables installed on the…
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 idea that the ocean has been managing its own transportation system for millions of years and we have only recently become aware of it is somewhat humble. Nothing that could be seen from a boat or a satellite image, not even a road or a channel. The world’s largest fish, whale sharks, seem to have known about this system of deep-ocean currents, seamounts, underwater canyons, and invisible thermal corridors all along. A ten-year satellite tracking study that was published in Frontiers in Marine Science has quantified what marine biologists had long suspected but were unable to confirm. Between 2015…
There comes a time when the official figures cease to be comforting as you stand at the edge of a low-lying coastline and watch the water creep closer than memory suggests it should. In a headline, the NOAA figure—roughly 8 to 9 inches of global sea level rise since 1880—sounds doable. However, an increasing amount of ocean research is starting to indicate that framing is, at best, insufficient. At worst, it’s pushing coastal planners and legislators to make choices based on data that the ocean itself consistently outpaces. Sea level risks may have been greatly underestimated, with between 77 and…
When you realize that the most advanced climate models ever created by humans may be measuring the wrong things, a certain kind of unease sets in. Not just a little off. structurally and fundamentally lacking in ways that permeate all forecasts, policy choices, and international agreements based on the presumption that we know how much carbon our oceans are truly absorbing. One recurring culprit is being identified by the most recent research: what happens to light in the deep ocean and how frequently that process has been ignored. A fairly simple concept underpins the majority of ocean carbon models: sunlight…
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.…