Author: Derrick Lester

Trillions of black, knobby lumps that appear almost embarrassingly ordinary sit somewhere three miles below the surface of the central Pacific, dispersed across an underwater plain bigger than most European nations. They look like charcoal that has been burned. Depending on who you ask, they are either the most environmentally friendly solution to climate change yet discovered or a slow-motion ecological error for which we will have to apologize for the rest of the century. Cobalt is the metal that is most sought after, and the lumps are polymetallic nodules. It’s difficult to ignore how rapidly the topic has changed.…

When most people think of the state-of-the-art in ocean science, they do not picture the seminar room on the upper floor of the Leibniz Institute in Warnemölle. The chairs don’t match. The carpet has the worn appearance of a structure that has seen thousands of debates over bacteria, oxygen, and salinity over the years. A postdoc from Kiel and a visiting researcher from Woods Hole sit next to each other on a Thursday afternoon, squinting at a slide that depicts oxygen depletion in the Gotland Deep. Although it’s a minor scene, the effects of these discussions are starting to spread…

These days, oceanography labs have a certain silence. Not the kind that is productive. The other type is the one you hear when researchers at Scripps or Woods Hole open their inboxes and discover another paper from Qingdao or Hangzhou that describes something they hadn’t yet fully imagined. This week, the Second Institute of Oceanography quietly launched DePTH-GPT, a deep-sea exploration model developed by a Chinese team. Video from submersibles is read by it. It deciphers sediment. It hears the odd clicks and moans of animals that most of us will never see. It accomplishes all of this in a…

The video isn’t as dramatic as Hollywood would like it to be. No glowing leviathan, no lunging predator. Nine kilometers below the surface, somewhere off the coast of Japan, a tiny, pale, faintly glowing shape drifts through black water. Even so, it’s difficult to watch the video without getting a little startled by the realization that the people who took it, who have dedicated their professional lives to cataloging what lives down there, still have no idea what they’re looking at. Animalia incerta sedis is the temporary name they have given it. The taxonomic equivalent of a shrug, it is…

There are bacteria doing things that no one in a pharmaceutical lab has ever seen before, somewhere around three kilometers below the Pacific’s surface in water so cold and dark that light has not touched it in millennia. They are under intense pressure to survive. They consume chemicals that leak out of seafloor fissures. And they are turning into the most subtly optimistic tale in contemporary medicine. For many years, soil has been the source of nearly all antibiotics found on hospital shelves. Soil-dwelling Streptomyces, penicillium molds, and fermentation tanks were adjusted semi-synthetically until something beneficial appeared. To be honest,…

Marine biology is characterized by a certain type of frustration that typically manifests itself when a researcher attempts to retrieve something delicate from the depths. At 800 meters, a jellyfish that appeared intact and alien reaches the surface as a slick of tissue. Perhaps the longest animal on the planet, a siphonophore, rips itself to pieces against the interior of a collection jar. This has been the silent price of attempting to comprehend the most delicate marine life for decades. What you study is damaged. After years of contemplation, Brennan Phillips has come up with a solution that, strangely enough,…

For the majority of the 20th century, putting people on a boat and sending them out for weeks was the only way to learn anything significant about the deep ocean. Expensive winches, diesel, seasickness, and a small army of graduate students carrying instruments over the side at three in the morning. Trickles of data were returned. A few million dollars could be spent on a research cruise that yields just one useful chart. Everyone agreed to that deal. There was no other option. Then, in the last few years, the agreement was subtly altered. An entire ship-based campaign used to…

Before any technical details or data, the first thing that divers mention is that it feels off. After the boat ride and the sun on your shoulders, you anticipate a momentary rush of coolness as you plunge into the water. It doesn’t appear. This summer, the water off the southern tip of Florida has been as warm as a bath and, in certain shallow areas, hotter than the hot tub at a roadside motel. Something about that is confusing. It’s not supposed to feel like indoor plumbing in the ocean. Katey Lesneski has been witnessing it firsthand down on the…

The International Seabed Authority’s description of its own consultations is disarmingly bureaucratic. A note verbale here, a consultation guide there, twenty-three submissions tallied like exam papers. And yet, beneath all that procedural calm, the ISA is doing something genuinely difficult: trying to figure out how an obscure UN body, headquartered in Kingston, should talk to the world about the deepest, least understood part of the planet. The Authority held public discussions on its draft Strategic Plan in March and April of 2018. The window was only slightly longer than six weeks. Members sent in fifteen submissions, contractors three, observers four,…

The way the deep ocean is being handled is subtly unnerving. When most people think of the sea, they envision beaches, waves, and possibly coral reefs in a vibrant tropical postcard. The cold, dark, nearly unfathomable area below, where mountains rise from the seafloor and corals older than the pyramids cling to rock, is the part that matters most, and they hardly ever imagine it. Few people are watching as that world is being scraped away. Over the past few decades, scientists have been revealing more and more about what lives down there. Life-filled hydrothermal vents that don’t require sunlight.…