Author: Derrick Lester

When a group of astronomers began closely examining a red dot, the James Webb Space Telescope was already experiencing an incredible run of discoveries. It was an abnormally red spot in deep space photography that didn’t easily fit into any established type of cosmic entity; it wasn’t the biggest or most dramatic item in the frame. That proved to be important. The group, headed by Dr. Rohan Naidu of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, has released research in Nature that describes what they think is a completely new class of astronomical entity, which they are referring to…

The ocean’s surface may appear to be boiling on a calm nite in the North Pacific, somewhere in the convergence zone where the warmer Kuroshio Current water meets the colder subarctic gyre. In reality, hundreds of squid are coming from the depths to feast on the tiny fish and crustaceans that congregate at the cold-water barrier. They move so quickly that their arrival is more noticeable as a commotion than as individual animals. The neon flying squid doesn’t make an announcement. It simply shows up at the surface in numerical form, carrying out its intended function. From the waters south…

Before the larvae at an oyster hatchery on Washington State’s Willapa Bay to survive, the water that enters from the Pacific must be carefully controlled. Since hatchery operators first began losing batches of seed oysters to water that was just too corrosive to allow their shells to form, this has been the case for more than ten years. Small enterprises find it difficult to absorb the cost and operational complexity of the solution, which includes monitoring the chemistry of incoming water, buffering it as needed, and timing intakes to avoid the most corrosive upwelled water. The hatcheries that were the…

No one on the surface has ever seen fish in the Gulf of Mexico with their own eyes. Not necessarily because they are uncommon—the Gulf’s midnight zone is home to a community of midwater species that is more varied than most ocean regions of comparable depth—but rather because most research programs are unable to regularly deploy the equipment needed to reach them, and the animals themselves are so delicate that bringing them to the surface frequently destroys the very characteristics that make them fascinating to study. By sending sampling nets and cameras into the water column at deep, researchers can…

From the road, Woods Hole appears to be a tiny settlement. The village, which has a drawbridge across a small canal, a ferry terminal, and a few thousand residents, is located at the southwestern edge of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s research campus is spread out along the shore in a collection of buildings ranging in age from mid-century to modern, and the water is constantly visible from someplace. The institution’s human-occupied submersible, HOV Alvin, is located thru the right door. Since its first dive in 1964, it has transported scientists to the seafloor over 5,000…

It’s important to note that most people are unfamiliar with bristlemouth fish, despite the fact that they may be among the most common vertebrates on Earth. They live in the mesopelagic zone, which is the middle layer of the ocean between 200 and 1,000 meters deep. Although their exact numbers are unknown, oceanographers regularly describe them as being massive. They have rows of light-producing organs called photophores running along their undersides, and they are small, black, and delicate. It has taken some time for scientists investigating specimens from U.S. West Coast Pacific seas to adequately characterize what they have discovered…

The map of Mars that is currently on your screen is most likely more comprehensive than any map of the same region on the ocean floor of Earth. That’s not exaggeration. The whole surface of Mars has been studied by orbiting spacecraft at resolutions that show objects a few meters broad, such as dust formations, lava tubes, craters, and old river courses. Since there is no ocean on the planet, radar and laser altimeters on satellites can measure the results from orbit by bouncing signals off the rock directly, covering millions of square kilometers per orbit and creating a comprehensive…

You can observe the effects of turbidity on water by standing at the harbor’s edge following a significant downpour. The harbor, which was rather clear the day before, is now brown-grey and thick with suspended soil that has been carried by the watershed’s accumulated grit and washed from upstream riverbanks and streets. When light strikes a surface, it doesn’t go very far. Visibility becomes almost nonexistent a few centimeters in. The water appears to be opaque. This is the most obvious form of turbidity; it is transient, coastal, and quite simple to see. A larger-scale variant of this phenomenon occurs…

When a remotely operated vehicle was roaming the bottom close to Darwin Island in the Galápagos in 2015, it stumbled across something that the scientists viewing the camera feed couldn’t quite classify. The creature was tiny, about the size of a golf ball, and it was perched on the sediment at a depth of 1,800 meters. That was an odd, but not exceptional, section. The hue was what caught people’s attention. It was a blue creature. Instead of the drab brownish-grey that deep-sea cephalopods typically wear as a sort of non-color at depths where sunlight doesn’t reach, they have a…

You are probably familiar with the scent of rotting sargassum if you have visited a Caribbean beach in recent years. It’s okay, the floating mats have sustained ecosystems for millions of years, but not when it’s drifting offshore in its natural state. It creates hydrogen sulfide at proportions that clear hotel terraces, close beaches, and, at high enough levels, actually cause respiratory discomfort when it washes ashore in the amounts already arriving on beaches from Barbados to the Yucatán, lies in the sun for a few days, and begins to degrade. The scent is overpowering. It is the stench of…