Author: Derrick Lester

Something that shouldn’t be there gets pulled up by a fisherman in August when he is carrying traps off the coast of Maine. Not a lobster, which are becoming more difficult to locate in the shallower inshore seas where they were formerly dependable. He pulls up a fat, hostile blue crab that you would expect in the Carolinas or the Chesapeake Bay, not this far north. He tosses it back, notes it in his manner of noting things (not on paper, but in the area of his memory dedicated to things that are evolving), and continues working. A few miles…

A Pacific footballfish, a rare and unusual species with a globular body, fang-like teeth, and a long filament extending from its head with a bulbous, lighted tip, washed up on a San Diego beach in early 2023. People took pictures of it and shared them online, and the response was predictable: fascination combined with something that deep-sea fish sometimes create but is difficult to pinpoint. The animal resembles something put together from disparate parts rather than a fish since it is designed for a setting so dissimilar from the surface world. Most people initially spotted the light at the end…

A few hundred meters below the surface, there is a region in the Eastern Tropical Pacific where oxygen runs out. Not entirely, not to the point of total anoxia, but low enough that the microorganisms carrying out their regular tasks in the water column switch to alternative metabolic pathways, using nitrate rather than oxygen to decompose organic matter. Nitrous oxide is a result of that process. Over time, it builds up in these oxygen minimum zones, accumulating in the cold, dark water where the gas has nowhere to go until it is forced toward the surface. There’s an upwelling. The…

There are polymetallic nodules on the bottom in the Pacific Ocean somewhere in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, an approximately 4.5 million square kilometer length of abyssal plain between Hawaii and Mexico. No one has yet discovered a commercially feasible method to gather these nodules at scale. There are nodules. They contain actual, verified manganese, cobalt, nickel, and copper. Despite decades of exploratory permits and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, a profitable mining operation has yet to emerge. As of 2026, the commercial case for deep-sea mining is still a forecast rather than an established reality. Nevertheless, the projects go on,…

When you drive along the Louisiana Gulf Coast on a summer afternoon, you pass an environment that was once much larger than it is now, past the marinas, fish camps, and rusted signs advertising shrimp boats for charter. The vast, fertile, esthetically nondescript but biologically significant wetlands that originally stretched miles inland from the shoreline have been disappearing for decades. The marshes have been simultaneously being eaten away by subsidence, sea level rise, and the channelization of the Mississippi River, which used to replenish them with sediment. The remaining material holds, absorbs, and filters less than it did during the…

The numbers that have been coming in over the past few years have challenged a comfortable assumption in a NOAA data center that processes temperature measurements from thousands of equipment placed throughout every major ocean basin. It was thought that the deep ocean, namely the water below one, two, and three kilometers, would be stable. Simple physics shields it from the rapid warming occurring at the surface, but it is not impervious to change forever. Heat travels slowly through water, and the mixing between the surface and deep levels is slow by any measure relevant to human timescales. For the…

When scientists first started removing amphipods from the Mariana Trench, which are crustaceans that scavenge the hadal zone at depths of up to eleven kilometers, and performing chemical analyzes on their tissue, the results were not what they had anticipated at the planet’s most remote and inaccessible biological environment. Mercury. Not trace amounts that fit the background of the natural geology. concentrations that are much higher than what the surrounding geology would generate on its own, in species that live in total darkness under pressures that crush almost everything that has ever been constructed by mankind, at a depth that…

Odysseas Froilan, a marine engineer, lowered a GoPro camera over the side of the hull on a line while a cruise liner was anchored in water that seemed from the deck to be any other picture-perfect blue Caribbean bay somewhere in the Bahamas. A few meters below the waterline, the footage did not show what most individuals standing at that barrier would have anticipated. Fish gathering close to the anchor chains, remoras clinging to the hull plating, pike-like shapes moving through the structural shadows, and at nite, sharks emerging from the shadows outside the ship’s frame, circling, passing, and swiftly…

Something begins to move south every spring when the snow melts across the cornfields of Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa. You can’t see it. Subterranean, it passes through drainage ditches and tributary streams before entering the Illinois, Ohio, and Missouri rivers, all of which feed into the Mississippi, which transports the entire pile to the Gulf of Mexico. Nitrogen and phosphorus, fertilizer nutrients that were applied to fields the previous season but weren’t completely absorbed by crops, the accumulated waste of millions of confined livestock, and regular chemical runoff from millions of suburban lawns, golf courses, and municipal drainage systems are…

The type of work that never makes headlines is taking place in a lab at Texas A&M’s Department of Oceanography in College Station at a rate that the larger oceanographic community is starting to take notice of. The apparatus in issue doesn’t appear particularly impressive; it consists of cylindrical devices that are designed to be thrown into the water and left there for years. They are about a meter long and roughly the diameter of a huge thermos. No live data dashboards, no video feeds, and no personnel watching displays in a control room. Simply a float that sinks and…