Author: Derrick Lester

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.…

The idea that a creature the size of a grain of rice could determine the fate of an entire underwater ecosystem seems almost ridiculous. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to avoid feeling as though we’ve been ignoring these tiny travelers for decades when we see the most recent findings from the Atlantic and South West Pacific. We still don’t fully understand how deep-sea larvae drift, sink, swim, and settle. Unbeknownst to the majority of us, their travels could be one of the most significant biological narratives currently unfolding on Earth. FieldDetailsResearch FocusDeep-sea larval dispersal and ecosystem connectivityLead InstitutionsUniversity College Dublin, Duke University,…

On Skidaway Island, which is located just southeast of Savannah, there is a section of salt marsh where the water no longer behaves as it once did. Now, the tides move a bit further inland. After storms, the mud smells different. For years, researchers at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography have been observing this gradual change, measuring it, cataloging it, debating its implications, and increasingly attempting to draw the attention of those who draft coastal policy in the American South. So far, the story is not dramatic. However, that is practically the point. From the Georgia barrier islands to the…

A number that appears small on paper has a profoundly unsettling quality. In the spring of 2024, the average sea surface temperature worldwide reached 21°C. Just one degree. Two degrees. It sounds almost courteous, the kind of figure you would pass by mindlessly in a data table. However, that reading—the highest since satellite monitoring started in 1982—is the kind of figure that keeps oceanographers up at night. Not because of what it stands for on its own, but rather because of everything it carries with it. 🌊 Key InformationDetailsReport NameCopernicus Ocean State Report (OSR 9 — 9th Edition)Published ByCopernicus Marine…

Nothing was supposed to be found by her. That’s the part that, months later, still feels weird. Maya was halfway through a sophomore project that primarily involved tagging frames in old submersible footage—the kind of tedious work that undergraduates are assigned when no one else wants to do it. The video originated from an archived and mostly forgotten 2016 Shinkai 6500 dive on the Central Indian Ridge. She once confessed that she watched it on a borrowed monitor in a dorm room that had a faint laundry detergent and instant noodle odor. SubjectMaya Ellinger (composite profile based on emerging undergraduate…

A treaty that most Americans have never heard of quietly became international law on the morning of January 17, somewhere off the coast of New York, when a UN flag was raised on time. Nearly two-thirds of the world’s oceans are currently governed by the High Seas Treaty, an ambitious treaty with an awkward name. It was completed by sixty nations. Not one of them was the United States, which made a big deal out of signing the agreement back in September 2023. At the joyous press conferences, no one wanted to focus on the difference between signing and ratification.…