Author: Derrick Lester

The public rarely pays much attention to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. It is housed in a suite of offices under the Interior Department and oversees the leasing of federal offshore waters for mineral and energy development. This type of regulatory action is typically overlooked until something goes wrong, but it is mentioned in trade journals. The lack of widespread coverage of what BOEM is now doing appears to be a serious oversight considering the scope. In addition to pushing several Pacific territories and Alaskan waters toward auction and starting sand dredging lease processes off Virginia, the agency is…

Researchers are examining recordings made at the ocean’s bottom in the acoustics lab at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, a campus perched on a wooded cliff above the Hudson River where the buildings resemble a quiet liberal arts college rather than a location producing some of the most important earth science on the planet. Those who are not familiar with deep-sea acoustics will not anticipate the sounds. Silence does not exist. The ocean floor is not silent. It was never the case. The calls of whales, the grinding of tectonic plates, the roar of underwater storms, and, increasingly,…

Engineers have been discreetly assembling something that most marine biology and oceanography scientists were unaware existed until recently in an operations center at the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific in San Diego, a building that sits between the harbor and a highway and doesn’t advertise what happens inside. Not a weapon. It’s not a monitoring system in the way that immediately springs to mind. a collection of data. Seafloor measurements, sonar readings, and satellite radar passes are combined to create the most comprehensive image of the ocean floor ever made public. This image reveals mountain ranges, trenches, and geological features…

When a communication is sent from a phone in New York to a server in London, most of the time no one considers its physical path. The seamless, instantaneous, and untethered nature of the internet’s infrastructure is part of its architecture. However, a fiber-optic cable the size of a garden hose is working somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean floor, at least a kilometer below the surface, to enable that communication. Approximately 530 of these cables are currently in use worldwide, and taken as a whole, they transport over 95% of all internet data. These cables are not satellites or radio…

What they discovered had nothing to do with the original plan. In 2014, while the research team on board the RV Thomas G. Thompson was waiting out a weather delay, oceanographer Brendan Philip, a graduate student at the University of Washington at the time, noticed something strange in the ship’s sonar readings: columns of bubbles rising from the seafloor about 50 miles off the coast of Newport, Oregon, about three-quarters of a mile below the surface. The bubbles came as a surprise. To conduct an investigation, they dispatched a remotely driven vehicle. Seafloor geologist Evan Solomon described what appeared on…

The Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite is currently over the Pacific Ocean at an altitude of about 1,336 kilometers and traveling at a speed of about 7.2 kilometers per second. It is doing what has been done continuously since 1992: bouncing a microwave pulse off the ocean’s surface, timing how long it takes to return, and using that measurement to track how high the sea is sitting in relation to a reference ellipsoid that scientists have agreed represents, as accurately as possible, what a perfectly spherical Earth would look like at mean sea level. On any given day, the figure the…

A core sample of ancient Antarctic ice that was extracted from over three kilometers below the surface is kept in a laboratory in Bern, Switzerland. It contains trapped air bubbles from a time when the environment was radically different from what it is today. By examining those bubbles, scientists are able to decipher hundreds of thousands of years of climate history from the concentration of gases and the ratio of oxygen isotopes preserved in the frozen record. The climate of Earth has never been steady, as those cores demonstrate. It has fluctuated between ice ages and warm spells, volcanic winters…

It feels completely normal to stand on Decatur Street in the French Quarter on a muggy afternoon, with the fragrance of the river blending with the cooking food from the open kitchen doors and the wooden balconies overhead providing shade for the banquette. Because this strip of land is a natural levee created over ages by the river depositing sediment during floods, the Mississippi is directly there, perhaps fifty yards away, higher than where you are. It is both the most high and the oldest area in New Orleans. The earth beneath your feet is either at sea level or…

A research ship is dragging a sound pulse across the water somewhere off the coast of Alaska that no one has ever properly listened to. The pulse exits the hull, descends into the darkness, bounces off a trench, a ridge, or an unidentified valley, and then reappears as a number. One figure, then another. Every day, thousands of them. That is how the ocean floor is drawn—slowly, in pings, by individuals that the majority of Americans have never heard of. It’s odd to acknowledge that a nation that claimed to have the best maps in the world for more than…

Deep-sea engineers are plagued by a specific type of failure known as Nereus. The $14 million robot, which was constructed at Woods Hole and is regarded as one of the most capable underwater vehicles ever created, vanished in the Kermadec Trench in 2014 at a depth of about 9,990 meters. Down six and a half miles. It was probably crushed by the pressure. Almost anything you put into it will be affected by 16,000 pounds per square inch. You can still sense the impact of that loss in the way MIT engineers describe their work when you speak with them…