Author: Derrick Lester

The ocean monitoring network does something that could be regarded as inconsistent each time a large cyclone passes across the Gulf of Mexico. The buoys that are meant to send temperature and wave data from directly beneath the storm become silent. Models rely on this data to forecast how quickly the storm will strengthen before reaching shore. Some people drag their anchors. Seas high enough to overcome their hulls overpower some. Some just cease to function when subjected to wave impacts that they were not intended to withstand. The instruments gathering the data are most likely to malfunction when the…

From the surface, the western Pacific, located about 80 kilometers from the Mussau Trench at the border of the Caroline Plate, appears no different from any other area of open ocean. Water, horizon, the specific shade of blue that the deep ocean adopts when the sky is the only thing to reflect. The seafloor here is located at a distance from the surface that would need hours of descent for any vehicle capable of reaching it, indicating the depth below this specific piece of it. What the crewed Chinese submersible Fendouzhe discovered on the seafloor during that trip was different…

Sometime in the last two years, someone made a chart in a conference room at the Department of Energy in Washington. People who have seen it but haven’t published it publicly have told me about it. Critical mineral supply chains—the routes from ground-level ore to processed material in a battery cell or a jet engine component—were depicted in the graphic, which color-coded the individuals in charge of each step. The chart was primarily one color during the processing phase. By all accounts, the accompanying briefing was depressing. China has long dominated the processing of key minerals and rare earth elements.…

Potato-sized rocks are found on the seafloor in quantities that have drawn significant corporate attention in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a section of the abyssal Pacific floor that is roughly the size of the continental United States and sits between Hawaii and Mexico at depths of four to five kilometers. In the context of electric vehicle battery supply chains and the geopolitical pressure to lessen reliance on Chinese-controlled land-based processing, the rocks—polymetallic nodules—contain nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese in ratios that make them truly intriguing to the minerals industry. For millions of years, they have been sitting there. Four businesses are…

When the first transatlantic telegraph cable was installed in 1858, the speed at which data is carried by a cable approximately the diameter of a garden hose at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere between the coast of Ireland and the eastern shore of the United States, would have been unthinkable. Every second, it handles billions of online requests, financial transactions, encrypted messages, video calls, and everything else that makes up the typical flow of digital life between two continents. The cable is located on the seafloor, mostly unattended, unmonitored, and unprotected by any teeth-like enforcement device. It shares…

The deep, wind-driven cold of the open ocean in midwinter, when the water’s surface temperature is only a few degrees above freezing and the wind across it removes heat quickly enough to produce visible steam rising from wave crests, is what the North Atlantic experiences in January at about 60 degrees north latitude. This is not the static cold of high altitudes. One of the most significant physical processes in the global climate system takes place here: warm, salty water that has moved north from the tropics cools at the surface until it becomes dense enough to sink, sliding down…

You can see what dredging machinery and years of massive clam harvesting have left behind at low tide on Scarborough Shoal, when the water lowers sufficiently to reveal the upper borders of what was once a reef shelf. The coral formations that make the Spratly and Paracel archipelagos one of the world’s most biodiverse reef systems—equivalent to the Amazon basin in terms of species density in terms of ecological richness—remain in much reduced form throughout a sizable portion of the South China Sea. Meters of sand blasted up from the nearby reef cover the seafloor beneath China’s man-made islands in…

Climate experts had been reading and rereading a report that was published in Nature before the end of 2018. Laure Resplandy, a researcher at Princeton University’s Department of Geosciences, was the primary author. The findings were so striking that they deviated from the typical incremental contributions to the literature on ocean heat. Her team’s findings revealed that the world’s oceans were absorbing almost 60% more heat each year than earlier UN climate predictions had indicated. Not a small change. a significant discrepancy between the findings of an independent measurement approach and what the models and reporting frameworks had been telling…

A crew from Kraken Robotics has been testing equipment that most people would never see and wouldn’t immediately identify if they did, at a harbor in Newfoundland where the water is consistently chilly enough to make you consider how long you’d endure if something went wrong. The KATFISH sonar system creates images of the seafloor that resemble aerial photography rather than sonar data. It is towed behind an unmanned surface vessel that moves across the surface while the sensor body runs below on a cable. A traditional sonar system would return a blurry smear, but the KATFISH system produces clear,…

A few years ago, a senior executive from a deep-sea mining company gave a presentation in a conference room at a mining industry event in London. The presentation began with pictures of Indonesian open-pit nickel mines, with red laterite soil scraped to the horizon, an orange river flowing downstream, and communities forced off their land to make way for extraction. Then he clicked to a different picture of the deep ocean, which was dark and seemed to be featureless, displaying nothing but a huge, peaceful body of water. The argument was the contrast. He asked, “Would you prefer this or…