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…
Author: Derrick Lester
Derrick Lester
Derrick Lester is a professor and editor at indeep-project.org. His academic career has been molded by a single, enduring obsession: the sea and all life in it. Drawing from marine biology, oceanography, and the kind of hard-won field knowledge that only comes from spending significant time on and under the water, Derrick's writing has the depth of a scholar thanks to his years of research and teaching experience. His writing delves into the science of marine life with the inquisitiveness of someone who has never fully moved past the wonder of what exists beneath the surface. Derrick hopes to introduce readers to a world that encompasses over 70% of the planet and is, in many respects, still largely unexplored through his contributions to indeep-project.org.
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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…
The Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a large area of the Pacific seafloor between Hawaii and Mexico that is about 4,000 meters below the surface and is home to potato-sized rocks called polymetallic nodules that are dispersed throughout the abyssal plain like nature’s version of a hidden treasure map, has an almost cinematic quality. For many years, people talked more about those manganese, cobalt, nickel, and copper-rich nodules than they actually touched them. The economics was ineffective. The technology wasn’t prepared. Additionally, the regulatory route was, at most, a two-lane road through a fog of bureaucracy. That is now changing. Additionally, the change…
A photo of a geodetic surveyor peering through a Wild T-3 theodolite from the top of a lighthouse can be found somewhere in NOAA’s digital archive. The picture is decades old. The man has a worn face. The ocean behind him is vast and uncaring, stretching out in all directions. Most people would scroll past this type of image, but it contains something priceless: proof of how people first started to measure, map, and attempt to comprehend the sea below them. That image is one of about 70,000 that are currently included in NOAA’s Digital Collections Project, which has been…
In the weeks leading up to the start of Atlantic hurricane season, a certain silence descends over the NOAA Aircraft Operations Center in Lakeland, Florida. Checklists are examined. Tests are conducted on the equipment. And the planes—those characteristic orange and white Lockheed WP-3D Orions with names like “Miss Piggy” and “Kermit” stenciled next to the cockpit are pulled out for inspections that resemble rituals. These are not your typical aircraft. While everyone else is driving away from them, they are the ones who fly straight into storms. And now, those aircraft are receiving communications infrastructure commensurate with the difficulty of…
On the Aleutian Peninsula of Alaska, there is a time in mid-May when the strain of an entire fishing season becomes nearly intolerable. There will be salmon runs soon. The fleets are prepared. And until very recently, the passage that saves ships 160 nautical miles and 20 hours of arduous sailing was essentially lost somewhere in the narrow, tide-churned waters of Bechevin Bay. Gone is not hyperbole. 28 of the 29 buoys that marked the channel through Bechevin Bay were gone by the time the U.S. Coast Guard evaluated the damage this spring; they had been completely destroyed by the…
Something has been secretly recording in the submarine canyons off the southwest coast of Western Australia, at depths where light vanishes and pressure turns into its own form of violence. The mineral architecture of deep-sea corals, which grow incredibly slowly and construct their skeletons one thin layer at a time over decades and centuries, is found in calcium carbonate, not on paper or in pixels. It’s difficult not to imagine them as nature’s filing cabinet, methodically preserving the ocean’s chemistry, temperature, and disposition while the rest of the world was mainly ignorant of their existence. A group of international scientists…