Author: Derrick Lester

Last spring, in a small conference room at Scripps, a marine biologist who has spent twenty years studying animals that most people will never see kept coming back to the word irreversible. The way scientists say things they wish weren’t true, he said it almost reluctantly. Outside, the Pacific appeared wide, serene, and uncaring as usual. However, something has changed seven miles below that surface. Long regarded as a sort of planetary basement, the Mariana Trench is currently being prepared for industrial extraction. Silently, the shift picked up speed. An executive order accelerating seabed mineral exploration in international waters was…

Somewhere in a federal building tucked into the foothills of the American Rockies, hard drives keep arriving in the mail. They come from research vessels, naval ships, university fleets — anywhere a ship has dragged a sonar pulse across the water. Inside those drives are slivers of the ocean floor, slowly stitched together into one of the strangest maps the United States is trying to build. Most Americans have never heard of it. That’s part of why it matters. The federal government is now spending close to $400 million to accelerate the charting of the seabed inside U.S. waters and…

On most mornings, the fog over La Jolla burns off slowly. From the cliffs above Scripps Institution of Oceanography, you can occasionally see the research ships still attached to the pier, their white hulls contrasting with the dark Pacific. For over a century, that section of coastline has served as a starting point for ocean science. What’s departing from it now may be the most important thing to sail in a very long time. In the weeks since, Scripps has started outlining a project that researchers are discreetly characterizing as the most ambitious American seafloor mapping effort in a generation.…

Two miles below the surface of the Pacific, somewhere between Hawaii and Mexico, the seafloor is covered in what look like blackened potatoes. They’re called polymetallic nodules, and they’ve been sitting there, untouched, for millions of years. For most of human history, nobody could reach them. Now everyone wants to. Walk through the lobby of any defense contractor or critical-minerals startup in Washington this spring, and you can almost feel the shift. Last April, President Trump signed an executive order pushing federal agencies to fast-track a deep-sea mining industry. In January, NOAA finalized a rule that consolidated exploration licenses and…

At the elbow of Cape Cod, where the road ends and the water begins, is the small town of Woods Hole. It appears too tiny for what takes place there. However, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s scientists and engineers have been creating the bizarre devices that transport people to the planet’s deepest regions for the past 60 years. Additionally, they are currently working in secret on a project that has the potential to alter our understanding of the ocean floor. To put it briefly, the strategy is to get to the trenches. Not the entire seafloor, which is now mostly…

The most common misconception about Chernobyl is that it ended in 1986. It didn’t. The other three reactors at the plant continued to run for years after Reactor No. 4 exploded in the early hours of April 26 of that year, while the world watched the fallout drift across Europe. Unit 2 operated until it was shut down by a turbine fire in 1991. Unit 1 ran through 1996. At 1:17 p.m. on December 15, 2000, an operator turned the AZ-5 emergency key, which was the same type of key that had caused the runaway surge in Unit 4 fourteen…

Three farm dogs named Honey, Junior, and Roxy were keeping watch over over a thousand sheep that were sprawled out in the shade of a utility-scale solar array in Lancaster, Kentucky, on a recent afternoon. It’s the kind of scene that falls somewhere between a power plant, a farm, and something else entirely. Additionally, it is becoming much less uncommon than it once was. Many people still find the idea of placing cattle under solar panels to be somewhat ridiculous. Cows are big. They make scratches on objects. They rely on fences. They were dismissed for years as being too…

The Ursa Major was supposed to be a ghost, one of those freighters flying the Russian flag that traverses oceans without drawing much attention. Constructed in 2009 and operating under sanctions since 2022, it has operated the so-called Syrian Express for years, transporting equipment to and from Tartus. However, by December 2024, there appeared to be a problem with its departure from St. Petersburg. The path was incorrect. The load was substantial. In retrospect, the manifest appears almost absurdly thin: 129 empty shipping containers, two cranes, and two “manhole covers.” It turns out that those manhole covers were parts of…

Every summer, a common sight can be seen in city parks, backyards, and beaches: people sprawling across the grass as if they’ve been knocked flat by an invisible force. By late afternoon, your eyelids feel heavy even though you spent a few hours outside doing nothing more demanding than reading a paperback or chatting over lemonade. The couch is what the body wants. It’s a strange kind of tiredness, the kind that doesn’t quite fit the day you’ve had. The answer is surprisingly multi-layered for something so prevalent. In this case, the sun itself isn’t the antagonist. It’s heat. The…

In Branson, it is just after midnight, the temperature is 73 degrees, there is no wind, and the humidity has risen to 100%. The Ozarks settle into a heavy, almost held-breath quality before a summer storm decides whether or not to actually arrive. This is the kind of stillness that people who live close to Table Rock Lake recognize without looking at a screen. Monday’s high is predicted to be close to 90, and the heat index is expected to rise to 98. Before nine in the morning, showers and thunderstorms could occur; after two in the afternoon, perhaps. In…