Author: Derrick Lester

Like a name that has been waiting on a list all year, the first named storm of the season typically makes an appearance with some fanfare. Arthur. It sounds almost soft. However, the residents of Sargent, Texas, and Morgan City, Louisiana, are not considering the name as the storm bearing that name moves northeast along the Texas coast. The water is on their minds. The forecast pushes Arthur inland, across the Texas–Louisiana border, and into the soft, flood-prone country beyond. Tropical storm warnings cover the entire coastal seam. The western Florida Panhandle, southern Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and a portion of…

Somewhere off the Aleutian chain, miles beneath a surface most people will never see, there are sponges that have been growing since before Alaska was a state. Coral formations stretch nearly seven feet tall, branching out like something from a dream rather than a seafloor survey. Scientists who have studied these waters describe the experience the way you might describe stumbling onto a hidden room in a house you thought you knew. It’s the kind of discovery that makes a person pause. And it’s exactly what’s now sitting in the path of a federal mining proposal that environmental groups say…

Something has been subtly altering the laws of biology 13,000 feet below the surface in an area of the Pacific seafloor that most people will never consider. Twenty-four new amphipod species have been discovered by researchers working in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a large plain of sediment between Hawaii and Mexico. Tucked away within that count is something even rarer: a completely new superfamily, a new branch grafted onto the tree of life itself. It’s the kind of discovery that seems insignificant until you realize how big of an impact it has. Researcher Tammy Horton of the National Oceanography Centre in…

Most drivers on Highway 90 have probably never noticed a building close to Ocean Springs. The Thad Cochran Marine Aquaculture Center is located behind a stretch of coastline that is more known for its beach houses and casinos than for federal science. That’s going to change, at least somewhat. In an effort to rebuild America’s seafood supply from the water up, the University of Southern Mississippi has joined a new national initiative supported by NOAA. The Cooperative Institute Fostering Aquaculture Research and Markets, or CIFARM, is a cumbersome bureaucratic name for the program, but its concept is quite straightforward. Initial…

Every deep-sea mining company’s planning documents contain a passage where the focus switches from robots to ships. It’s not a glamorous change. Investor decks are not written about it. However, it may prove to be more significant than anything occurring on the Clarion-Clipperton seafloor four kilometers below. After a harvester scrapes polymetallic nodules off the abyssal plain, how do you actually transport them to an onshore refinery? This is an oddly difficult problem to solve despite its seemingly straightforward form. It sounds like a typical shipping inquiry that any port authority deals with on a daily basis. It isn’t. The…

In the early weeks of June, when tenders idle off Naknek and crews wait on radio chatter to find out which district has just opened, Bristol Bay still smells like brine and diesel. That waiting was more important than usual this year. The Yukon and the Kuskokwim chief are just two of the rivers in Western Alaska that have been struggling for years. The returns are so poor that federal officials have repeatedly declared commercial fishery disasters, citing runs of sockeye and chum that just never materialized. Recent summers have seen villages along those rivers witness empty nets, sometimes leading…

We have taken pictures of the moon’s far side. Four hundred million kilometers away, we have parked a rover on Mars and watched it drill into red dust. However, we have never had a close-up look at about 95% of our own ocean floor. Brussels took action on June 3rd because it appears to find that disparity embarrassing, if not a little concerning. The project, known as OceanEye, is just as ambitious as its name implies. By 2035, the European Commission hopes to supply 35% of the world’s ocean observation system and secure a comparable portion of the global market…

Akwa Ibom’s deep seaport has mostly existed on paper for more than 20 years, appearing in government statements, feasibility studies, and the occasional headline announcing a new partner. A deep-water terminal along the Gulf of Guinea that can accommodate the kind of megavessels that currently completely avoid Nigeria and instead pass through Lomé or Tema is a familiar dream. Politicians enjoy articulating this kind of vision, but funding it turns out to be much more difficult. Governor Umo Eno took that vision to Paris this month, where he met with executives from Africa Global Logistics and went over a new…

When a camera is lowered four kilometers into complete darkness and begins returning images that no one recognizes, a certain kind of silence descends upon a ship’s control room. This year, that occurred multiple times on multiple oceans. Actually, it’s starting to resemble a pattern: if you send a robot far enough, the planet will begin to reveal things that it has been keeping hidden for a very long time. A team headed by Smithsonian scientist Karen Osborn spent two weeks drifting through what is known as the midwater—the large, dark layer of ocean between the sunlit surface and the…

A small group of scientists spend their days determining what constitutes a record-breaking year in a building in College Park, Maryland, which has beige carpeting and the unique quiet of a federal office park. It doesn’t appear to be much. Nothing like the urgency of a hurricane briefing—no cameras, no press conferences. However, NOAA’s monthly and annual temperature and precipitation assessments, which originate from that building, have become something akin to scripture for anyone attempting to have a serious conversation about American weather. This wasn’t always the case. Climate data existed in an odd middle ground for decades: scientists trusted…