These days, oceanography labs have a certain silence. Not the kind that is productive. The other type is the one you hear when researchers at Scripps or Woods Hole open their inboxes and discover another paper from Qingdao or Hangzhou that describes something they hadn’t yet fully imagined. This week, the Second Institute of Oceanography quietly launched DePTH-GPT, a deep-sea exploration model developed by a Chinese team. Video from submersibles is read by it. It deciphers sediment. It hears the odd clicks and moans of animals that most of us will never see. It accomplishes all of this in a…
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 video isn’t as dramatic as Hollywood would like it to be. No glowing leviathan, no lunging predator. Nine kilometers below the surface, somewhere off the coast of Japan, a tiny, pale, faintly glowing shape drifts through black water. Even so, it’s difficult to watch the video without getting a little startled by the realization that the people who took it, who have dedicated their professional lives to cataloging what lives down there, still have no idea what they’re looking at. Animalia incerta sedis is the temporary name they have given it. The taxonomic equivalent of a shrug, it is…
There are bacteria doing things that no one in a pharmaceutical lab has ever seen before, somewhere around three kilometers below the Pacific’s surface in water so cold and dark that light has not touched it in millennia. They are under intense pressure to survive. They consume chemicals that leak out of seafloor fissures. And they are turning into the most subtly optimistic tale in contemporary medicine. For many years, soil has been the source of nearly all antibiotics found on hospital shelves. Soil-dwelling Streptomyces, penicillium molds, and fermentation tanks were adjusted semi-synthetically until something beneficial appeared. To be honest,…
Marine biology is characterized by a certain type of frustration that typically manifests itself when a researcher attempts to retrieve something delicate from the depths. At 800 meters, a jellyfish that appeared intact and alien reaches the surface as a slick of tissue. Perhaps the longest animal on the planet, a siphonophore, rips itself to pieces against the interior of a collection jar. This has been the silent price of attempting to comprehend the most delicate marine life for decades. What you study is damaged. After years of contemplation, Brennan Phillips has come up with a solution that, strangely enough,…
For the majority of the 20th century, putting people on a boat and sending them out for weeks was the only way to learn anything significant about the deep ocean. Expensive winches, diesel, seasickness, and a small army of graduate students carrying instruments over the side at three in the morning. Trickles of data were returned. A few million dollars could be spent on a research cruise that yields just one useful chart. Everyone agreed to that deal. There was no other option. Then, in the last few years, the agreement was subtly altered. An entire ship-based campaign used to…
Before any technical details or data, the first thing that divers mention is that it feels off. After the boat ride and the sun on your shoulders, you anticipate a momentary rush of coolness as you plunge into the water. It doesn’t appear. This summer, the water off the southern tip of Florida has been as warm as a bath and, in certain shallow areas, hotter than the hot tub at a roadside motel. Something about that is confusing. It’s not supposed to feel like indoor plumbing in the ocean. Katey Lesneski has been witnessing it firsthand down on the…
The International Seabed Authority’s description of its own consultations is disarmingly bureaucratic. A note verbale here, a consultation guide there, twenty-three submissions tallied like exam papers. And yet, beneath all that procedural calm, the ISA is doing something genuinely difficult: trying to figure out how an obscure UN body, headquartered in Kingston, should talk to the world about the deepest, least understood part of the planet. The Authority held public discussions on its draft Strategic Plan in March and April of 2018. The window was only slightly longer than six weeks. Members sent in fifteen submissions, contractors three, observers four,…
The way the deep ocean is being handled is subtly unnerving. When most people think of the sea, they envision beaches, waves, and possibly coral reefs in a vibrant tropical postcard. The cold, dark, nearly unfathomable area below, where mountains rise from the seafloor and corals older than the pyramids cling to rock, is the part that matters most, and they hardly ever imagine it. Few people are watching as that world is being scraped away. Over the past few decades, scientists have been revealing more and more about what lives down there. Life-filled hydrothermal vents that don’t require sunlight.…
The idea that a creature the size of a grain of rice could determine the fate of an entire underwater ecosystem seems almost ridiculous. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to avoid feeling as though we’ve been ignoring these tiny travelers for decades when we see the most recent findings from the Atlantic and South West Pacific. We still don’t fully understand how deep-sea larvae drift, sink, swim, and settle. Unbeknownst to the majority of us, their travels could be one of the most significant biological narratives currently unfolding on Earth. FieldDetailsResearch FocusDeep-sea larval dispersal and ecosystem connectivityLead InstitutionsUniversity College Dublin, Duke University,…
On Skidaway Island, which is located just southeast of Savannah, there is a section of salt marsh where the water no longer behaves as it once did. Now, the tides move a bit further inland. After storms, the mud smells different. For years, researchers at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography have been observing this gradual change, measuring it, cataloging it, debating its implications, and increasingly attempting to draw the attention of those who draft coastal policy in the American South. So far, the story is not dramatic. However, that is practically the point. From the Georgia barrier islands to the…