Author: Derrick Lester

The tracks of a research ship from the late 1970s can still be seen somewhere on the Pacific Ocean floor, between Hawaii and Mexico. There hasn’t been a hurricane down there. There was not enough current to destroy what remained. A silent monument to something that people are only now starting to fully comprehend—just sediment that has been disturbed once and frozen in that state for decades. Deep-sea mining and seafloor dredging have long occupied the unsettling gray area where environmental uncertainty and industrial appetite collide. The justifications have been essentially the same for years: the ocean is vast, communities…

The ocean floor resembles a golf driving range somewhere between California and Hawaii, thousands of meters below the surface where sunlight has never reached. If the golf balls happened to contain nickel, cobalt, manganese, and copper in amounts that could alter global supply chains, that is. These are tiny, dark, potato-shaped polymetallic nodules that have been gradually building up on the seafloor for tens of millions of years. Additionally, they are currently at the epicenter of one of the decade’s most significant and underreported geopolitical struggles. The area in question is known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, or CCZ. It is…

There is nothing noteworthy about the road into Pocasset, Massachusetts. The smell of salt air off Buzzards Bay, a strip of peaceful business buildings, and the leisurely pace of Cape Cod throughout the year are all present. However, a group of scientists and engineers working in a specially constructed manufacturing facility on Jonathan Bourne Drive has spent more than thirty years creating the tools that enable the world to truly see what’s going on in the ocean. When Falmouth Scientific, Inc. was established in 1989, real-time ocean data collection was mostly theoretical for the majority of the world’s seas. In…

It’s easy to assume that the ocean is acting exactly as it always has when you stand on the edge of Waikiki on a calm morning and watch the waves roll in off the Pacific. The water is heated. The swells show up on time. Some surfers have already left. Nothing seems off. However, something is changing several hundred meters below that serene surface—quietly, steadily, and in ways that won’t remain undetectable for very long. Over the past 20 years, ocean scientists researching the deep current systems surrounding the Hawaiian archipelago have observed a gradual but discernible decrease in circulation…

The idea that, somewhere beneath the North Atlantic, instruments that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to deploy and took years to engineer are now being pulled up and shipped to shore—not because they stopped working, but because someone in Washington decided they should—is subtly disorienting. The Ocean Observatories Initiative, a network of over 900 deep-sea instruments dispersed across five arrays in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, was “descoped,” according to a May announcement from the National Science Foundation. Since 2016, the system, which cost about $368 million to construct and $48 million annually to maintain, has been operating nonstop.…

Before foot traffic picks up along the waterfront and the Navy ships start their steady movements across the harbor, a certain kind of silence descends over San Diego Bay in the early morning. If you’re paying attention, you might spot something strange in that silence: a low-slung, unmanned craft moving through the water without a pilot. Not a crew. Not a sound. Only the machine and the mission. It’s more difficult to fully explain what’s happening along this section of California coastline than it is to observe. Silently, San Diego has emerged as the epicenter of one of the most…

A certain type of discovery doesn’t come with an abrupt flash on the sonar screen or a dramatic instrument alarm. Occasionally, it appears gradually, either as noise in the data or as geological features that scientists have previously identified a hundred times. One of those seems to have been the hydrothermal field beneath the Bering Sea, which was active, present, and largely overlooked by the historical record until someone chose to take a closer look. While on a research expedition, Jonas Preine noticed that the data began to suggest something unexpected. Researchers have been studying the seafloor between diverging tectonic…

The erosion is evident when you stand on the coast at Utqiańvik, the former Barrow, the northernmost city of Alaska, where the Arctic Ocean meets the edge of the continent and the permafrost is so deep that structures must be built around it. not as a graph’s abstract trend. as a moving edge. The land beneath their original foundations is melting into the Beaufort Sea in pieces of frozen earth that break away from the coastline and melt into the ocean; houses that were fifty meters from the shore ten years ago are now closer, some of which have already…

Currently, there is a ship somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean that is 110 meters long, carrying up to 40 scientists and crew members. It is trailing a fiber-optic tether connected to a remotely operated vehicle called SuBastian, which is likely hovering over a portion of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that no camera has ever reached. The name painted on the ship’s hull is the only thing about it that makes people take a second look when they see it for the first time. Falkor R/V (also). The Luckdragon from Michael Ende’s 1979 book The Neverending Story inspired the name. Not after…

A volcano the size of a small city is located about 300 miles off the coast of Oregon, at a depth where the pressure is about 140 times what you’d feel standing at sea level and no sunlight has penetrated since the ocean formed. It erupts roughly every ten years, reshaping miles of seafloor and supporting a thriving ecosystem of creatures that, according to most conventional biological logic, shouldn’t exist. The most active volcano in the northeast Pacific is Axial Seamount. In 1998, it erupted. In 2011, it erupted once more. When it erupted in 2015, the seafloor monitoring devices…