Author: Derrick Lester

Over the course of several years and several lengthy sessions, diplomats from all over the world worked in the negotiating rooms at UN headquarters in New York to create the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction treaty, or BBNJ Agreement, which was adopted in 2023 and was hailed at the time as a landmark for ocean governance. When the gavel came down, there was genuine warmth in the language used in the room. A framework for safeguarding marine biodiversity in international waters finally existed on paper after twenty years of unsuccessful attempts. The paper’s shortcomings and the discrepancies between its coverage and…

Three massive turbines are spinning sixteen kilometers off the coast of Occitanie in a section of the Mediterranean that appears from the beach like any other deep blue stretch of open sea. They are not supported by foundations that are drilled into the ocean floor. They are positioned far enough out that the winds blow more forcefully and consistently than anything available closer to shore, and they float, tied to the bottom by mooring lines, rising and falling with the swells. The Éoliennes Flottantes du Golfe du Lion attained maximum capacity in July 2026. Thirty megawatts of clean electricity are…

There is rarely a clear path from a DARPA funding to a commercial product. Defense research typically focuses on finding solutions to particular military issues, resulting in technology that is kept in classified or semi-classified settings for years before anybody outside the original project is aware of its true potential. Similar steps were taken by the autonomous sonar mapping systems that are currently being used in commercial deep-sea exploration: they were first developed for naval surveillance and undersea domain awareness, then gradually declassified, licensed, and modified for the very different economic logic of locating and mapping objects on the ocean…

Operators at a shellfish hatchery on the Oregon coast discovered years ago that their oyster larvae would not survive if they just pumped in incoming Pacific water. Before the water came into contact with the tanks, it had to be analyzed, its chemistry measured, and its acidity evaluated. The larvae fail to build shells within hours of the water shift on days when upwelled deep water—which is colder, more acidic, and deficient in carbonate ions—reaches the surface and is drawn into the intake. Early adopters of this strategy modified their operations and managed to survive. Before anyone could pinpoint the…

The sound of an angle grinder on engineered stone is a constant in a San Gabriel Valley countertop fabrication facility. The hard, dense material being cut, which is intended to resemble real marble or quartz, leaves behind a white dust that clings to surfaces, clothes, and skin. That dust enters the lungs without adequate respiratory protection and water suppression. Additionally, the silica content of engineered stone can induce serious lung disease within a few years of continuous contact, in contrast to many job exposures that cause harm gradually over decades. Before anyone thot to systematically warn them, a few workers…

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…