Seeing a coral reef die has a subtle, devastating quality. It doesn’t occur with a roar or a crash. Like something that was once vibrant being erased, the color gradually fades and turns white. The experience of floating above a bleached reef, which is still structurally sound and architecturally stunning but somehow emptied out, is described by scientists who have dedicated their careers to diving these reefs. hollowed out. The fourth global coral bleaching event, which started in early 2023, is probably over as of mid-2025, according to NOAA, confirming what many in the marine science community had been anticipating.…
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 way deep-sea mining is discussed in international policy forums and boardrooms is unsettling. The terminology is forward-thinking, bordering on clinical: “resource security,” “battery-grade minerals,” “the green transition.” The fact that no one fully understands what exists four kilometers below the ocean’s surface and that removing metal nodules from the seafloor could permanently destroy ecosystems that took millions of years to form are topics that are rarely discussed. The growing demand for cobalt, nickel, and manganese—metals necessary for solar panels and electric vehicle batteries—has contributed to the pressure to mine the deep sea for years. In contrast to terrestrial mining,…
Finding out that the sun, the same one that warms your coffee through the kitchen window, can covertly start destroying the power grid hours before anyone on Earth realizes it’s coming, is a bit disorienting. It turns out that this confusion is precisely the issue. An incoming geomagnetic disturbance was classified as a possible G4 or greater event in May by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. That’s serious by most standards. Grid engineers are extremely uncomfortable with the voltage instabilities and protective system misfires that a G4 brings. The G-scale runs from G1 to G5. However, the storm’s final intensity…
Observing a significant snowstorm sweep across the Eastern Seaboard from space has an almost cinematic quality. Surprisingly deliberately, the whirling white mass pushes across state lines, engulfs highways, and closes federal offices. The majority of people who watch it from their windows are unaware that a constellation of satellites is tracking every move the storm makes somewhere high above them, feeding data to systems that are smarter and faster than anything the public has been told much about. NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service intervened on January 6, 2025, when a powerful winter storm battered Washington, D.C. and…
Observing an ocean rise from space has a subtle unnerving quality. Not dramatically, not all at once, but inch by inch, measured in centimeters by a 1,336-kilometer-high satellite the size of a small bus. That is precisely what the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite has been doing, and the images it took over the Pacific Ocean in early June 2026 are being compared to one of the most catastrophic weather events in recorded history. After sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific rose at least 0.5 degrees Celsius above average for several months in a row, NOAA officially…
In the early morning of mid-June, Missoula is especially serene. The air feels like it belongs to a different season for a brief period of time, perhaps forty minutes, as the Clark Fork River absorbs whatever light filters over the Rattlesnake Wilderness before the valley floor warms. The thermometer then rises. Quick. In the afternoon, the city is baking silently under blue skies that almost seem artificial, with temperatures comfortably in the high seventies or low eighties. The forecast for this week seems almost too optimistic. Highs are expected to reach 80 degrees on Thursday, 83 on Friday, and 88…
One of the more reliable areas of broadcast news may appear to be the weather desk at a local TV station. Every few years, there might be a new radar system, but the faces and graphics remain the same. However, there’s a subtle sense that something important has changed this spring as you pass KSTP’s studios in the Twin Cities. It’s a gradual change that only becomes apparent when you take a step back and consider the bigger picture. When Matt Serwe announced his departure, it all began. For viewers who tuned in expecting consistency, Serwe had been the weekend…
When your phone displays nothing while you’re standing in a perfectly normal location, such as a highway in Wyoming, a rural Pakistani valley, or a boat a few miles off the coast, you experience a particular kind of frustration. Not a single bar. The signal is now just a blank icon. It’s the kind of moment when you realize how much of the world is just out of reach for the cellular network. Only roughly 15% of the Earth’s surface is truly covered by cellular infrastructure, according to satellite communications company Iridium. There is silence for the remainder. In the…
The mid-June weather in Fargo has an almost defiant quality. When you step outside expecting summer—steady warmth, long evenings, that certain golden light that makes the flatlands look almost cinematic—you are met with an 8-mile-per-hour northwest wind and a 30% chance of showers just as you had made the decision to leave the jacket at home. Every year, it takes place. And for some reason, it still surprises people every year. At around 13 degrees Celsius in the early hours of June 18, Fargo is doing what it does best right now: keeping everyone guessing. With partly cloudy skies and…
A Pacific Ocean that won’t cool down has a subtle unnerving quality. In the central-eastern equatorial Pacific, subsurface temperatures have been more than six degrees Celsius above average. This figure may sound technical, but it actually means that heat is building beneath the surface like pressure behind a dam, eventually forcing its way upward and altering weather patterns across entire continents. As we approach what looks to be a challenging winter season, that is precisely what is taking place at the moment. According to the World Meteorological Organization, there is an 80% chance that El Niño conditions will continue through…