Author: Derrick Lester

The ocean floor is dotted with items that appear to be potatoes from a distance on the abyssal plain between Hawaii and Mexico. This area of the Pacific is so far away that it receives only the tiniest trickle of biological material sinking from the surface waters four to six kilometers above. As the water above them cycles through ice ages, interglacial periods, and the entire industrial history of human civilization, these polymetallic nodules—accretions of manganese and iron oxides—form around a piece of shell or shark tooth over millions of years. They grow at a rate of a few millimeters…

The harbor at Moss Landing, California, a tiny fishing and research village tucked between Monterey Bay and the Elkhorn Slough wetlands, is not very striking. The R/V David Packard appears more industrial than exploratory, the kind of vessel that emphasizes patient work rather than adventure, as it rests at its dock next to commercial fishing boats. A few hundred meters away, engineers and biologists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute are accomplishing something that oceanographic organizations with much larger budgets and more well-known names haven’t been able to do: they are methodically mapping the deep ocean at scale, discovering…

The ocean is everywhere when you stand in Pago Pago Harbor on a clear morning. The water is so blue it almost seems unreal, fishing boats are tied along the docks, and Tutuila’s green volcanic ridges rise behind the town in a way that gives the impression that the island was created to impress. It is the main reality of this location. It provides food, establishes the calendar, and bears the cultural significance that land could have in other communities. Under the more general heading of Fa’asamoa, or the Samoan way, the relationship between Samoan communities and the ocean is…

Layers of mud are building up at a pace of about a millimeter per year somewhere beneath the warm blue-green water of the Gulf of Mexico, a few thousand meters below the surface, in the never-ending darkness where no sunshine has ever reached. This is something they have been doing for a very long time. The shells of microscopic organisms known as foraminifera, whose chemical makeup records the temperature of the water they inhabited, plant matter carrying isotopic signatures of rainfall and river runoff from the nearby land, and coarser sediment layers that were abruptly deposited when a hurricane passed…

The public rarely pays much attention to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. It is housed in a suite of offices under the Interior Department and oversees the leasing of federal offshore waters for mineral and energy development. This type of regulatory action is typically overlooked until something goes wrong, but it is mentioned in trade journals. The lack of widespread coverage of what BOEM is now doing appears to be a serious oversight considering the scope. In addition to pushing several Pacific territories and Alaskan waters toward auction and starting sand dredging lease processes off Virginia, the agency is…

Researchers are examining recordings made at the ocean’s bottom in the acoustics lab at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, a campus perched on a wooded cliff above the Hudson River where the buildings resemble a quiet liberal arts college rather than a location producing some of the most important earth science on the planet. Those who are not familiar with deep-sea acoustics will not anticipate the sounds. Silence does not exist. The ocean floor is not silent. It was never the case. The calls of whales, the grinding of tectonic plates, the roar of underwater storms, and, increasingly,…

Engineers have been discreetly assembling something that most marine biology and oceanography scientists were unaware existed until recently in an operations center at the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific in San Diego, a building that sits between the harbor and a highway and doesn’t advertise what happens inside. Not a weapon. It’s not a monitoring system in the way that immediately springs to mind. a collection of data. Seafloor measurements, sonar readings, and satellite radar passes are combined to create the most comprehensive image of the ocean floor ever made public. This image reveals mountain ranges, trenches, and geological features…

When a communication is sent from a phone in New York to a server in London, most of the time no one considers its physical path. The seamless, instantaneous, and untethered nature of the internet’s infrastructure is part of its architecture. However, a fiber-optic cable the size of a garden hose is working somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean floor, at least a kilometer below the surface, to enable that communication. Approximately 530 of these cables are currently in use worldwide, and taken as a whole, they transport over 95% of all internet data. These cables are not satellites or radio…

What they discovered had nothing to do with the original plan. In 2014, while the research team on board the RV Thomas G. Thompson was waiting out a weather delay, oceanographer Brendan Philip, a graduate student at the University of Washington at the time, noticed something strange in the ship’s sonar readings: columns of bubbles rising from the seafloor about 50 miles off the coast of Newport, Oregon, about three-quarters of a mile below the surface. The bubbles came as a surprise. To conduct an investigation, they dispatched a remotely driven vehicle. Seafloor geologist Evan Solomon described what appeared on…

The Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite is currently over the Pacific Ocean at an altitude of about 1,336 kilometers and traveling at a speed of about 7.2 kilometers per second. It is doing what has been done continuously since 1992: bouncing a microwave pulse off the ocean’s surface, timing how long it takes to return, and using that measurement to track how high the sea is sitting in relation to a reference ellipsoid that scientists have agreed represents, as accurately as possible, what a perfectly spherical Earth would look like at mean sea level. On any given day, the figure the…