Author: Derrick Lester

A core sample of ancient Antarctic ice that was extracted from over three kilometers below the surface is kept in a laboratory in Bern, Switzerland. It contains trapped air bubbles from a time when the environment was radically different from what it is today. By examining those bubbles, scientists are able to decipher hundreds of thousands of years of climate history from the concentration of gases and the ratio of oxygen isotopes preserved in the frozen record. The climate of Earth has never been steady, as those cores demonstrate. It has fluctuated between ice ages and warm spells, volcanic winters…

It feels completely normal to stand on Decatur Street in the French Quarter on a muggy afternoon, with the fragrance of the river blending with the cooking food from the open kitchen doors and the wooden balconies overhead providing shade for the banquette. Because this strip of land is a natural levee created over ages by the river depositing sediment during floods, the Mississippi is directly there, perhaps fifty yards away, higher than where you are. It is both the most high and the oldest area in New Orleans. The earth beneath your feet is either at sea level or…

A research ship is dragging a sound pulse across the water somewhere off the coast of Alaska that no one has ever properly listened to. The pulse exits the hull, descends into the darkness, bounces off a trench, a ridge, or an unidentified valley, and then reappears as a number. One figure, then another. Every day, thousands of them. That is how the ocean floor is drawn—slowly, in pings, by individuals that the majority of Americans have never heard of. It’s odd to acknowledge that a nation that claimed to have the best maps in the world for more than…

Deep-sea engineers are plagued by a specific type of failure known as Nereus. The $14 million robot, which was constructed at Woods Hole and is regarded as one of the most capable underwater vehicles ever created, vanished in the Kermadec Trench in 2014 at a depth of about 9,990 meters. Down six and a half miles. It was probably crushed by the pressure. Almost anything you put into it will be affected by 16,000 pounds per square inch. You can still sense the impact of that loss in the way MIT engineers describe their work when you speak with them…

Last spring, in a small conference room at Scripps, a marine biologist who has spent twenty years studying animals that most people will never see kept coming back to the word irreversible. The way scientists say things they wish weren’t true, he said it almost reluctantly. Outside, the Pacific appeared wide, serene, and uncaring as usual. However, something has changed seven miles below that surface. Long regarded as a sort of planetary basement, the Mariana Trench is currently being prepared for industrial extraction. Silently, the shift picked up speed. An executive order accelerating seabed mineral exploration in international waters was…

Somewhere in a federal building tucked into the foothills of the American Rockies, hard drives keep arriving in the mail. They come from research vessels, naval ships, university fleets — anywhere a ship has dragged a sonar pulse across the water. Inside those drives are slivers of the ocean floor, slowly stitched together into one of the strangest maps the United States is trying to build. Most Americans have never heard of it. That’s part of why it matters. The federal government is now spending close to $400 million to accelerate the charting of the seabed inside U.S. waters and…

On most mornings, the fog over La Jolla burns off slowly. From the cliffs above Scripps Institution of Oceanography, you can occasionally see the research ships still attached to the pier, their white hulls contrasting with the dark Pacific. For over a century, that section of coastline has served as a starting point for ocean science. What’s departing from it now may be the most important thing to sail in a very long time. In the weeks since, Scripps has started outlining a project that researchers are discreetly characterizing as the most ambitious American seafloor mapping effort in a generation.…

Two miles below the surface of the Pacific, somewhere between Hawaii and Mexico, the seafloor is covered in what look like blackened potatoes. They’re called polymetallic nodules, and they’ve been sitting there, untouched, for millions of years. For most of human history, nobody could reach them. Now everyone wants to. Walk through the lobby of any defense contractor or critical-minerals startup in Washington this spring, and you can almost feel the shift. Last April, President Trump signed an executive order pushing federal agencies to fast-track a deep-sea mining industry. In January, NOAA finalized a rule that consolidated exploration licenses and…

At the elbow of Cape Cod, where the road ends and the water begins, is the small town of Woods Hole. It appears too tiny for what takes place there. However, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s scientists and engineers have been creating the bizarre devices that transport people to the planet’s deepest regions for the past 60 years. Additionally, they are currently working in secret on a project that has the potential to alter our understanding of the ocean floor. To put it briefly, the strategy is to get to the trenches. Not the entire seafloor, which is now mostly…

The most common misconception about Chernobyl is that it ended in 1986. It didn’t. The other three reactors at the plant continued to run for years after Reactor No. 4 exploded in the early hours of April 26 of that year, while the world watched the fallout drift across Europe. Unit 2 operated until it was shut down by a turbine fire in 1991. Unit 1 ran through 1996. At 1:17 p.m. on December 15, 2000, an operator turned the AZ-5 emergency key, which was the same type of key that had caused the runaway surge in Unit 4 fourteen…