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…
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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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…
About halfway between Hawaii and Mexico, there is a section of the Pacific Ocean where the seafloor resembles something from a fever dream. The seabed is covered in lumpy, dark formations, roughly the size and shape of potatoes, thousands of feet below the surface, in almost complete darkness and cold that would kill a human in minutes. Like trees counting time, they have been sitting there for millions of years, slowly growing and building up rings of nickel, cobalt, manganese, and copper. They are referred to by scientists as polymetallic nodules. They are referred to as an opportunity by mining…
A group of environmental organizations filed a federal lawsuit on April 20, the sixteenth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, to prevent BP from drilling one of the deepest oil wells ever attempted in the Gulf of Mexico. The timing wasn’t accidental. It was a declaration. Kaskida is the name of the project in question. Since discovering the field in 2006 and spending years creating the kind of high-pressure drilling technology that might actually reach it, BP has been quietly working toward it for almost 20 years. The location, which is about 250 miles off the coast of Louisiana at…
There is a specific type of flooding that doesn’t make its presence known by wind or thunder. It simply appears, silently and almost courteously, whether it’s pooling in a Charleston parking lot on a sunny afternoon or lapping over a seawall in Annapolis. It’s known to longtime residents of these towns as “nuisance flooding.” Like a neighbor who is consistently a little late, it’s the kind of thing you learn to prepare for. However, that neighbor might be bringing company this year. El Niño has officially formed in the tropical Pacific, according to NOAA’s mid-June confirmation. By winter, forecasters predict…
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Thursday was one of those Washington moments that don’t make the evening news but still have an impact. In front of senators, Wesley Brooks, a soft-spoken EPA official with experience in regulatory affairs, made statements that cause mining executives to recline in their seats. Trump has chosen Brooks to lead the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, a title so awkward that the majority of Americans are unaware of it. However, the bureau is important. It influences how the United States communicates with the rest of the world about plastics,…
There has been a blind spot hovering just above the waves for the majority of the time meteorologists have been flying into hurricanes. Punching through the eyewall, hurricane hunter aircraft can collect data while in the air and transmit it back to Miami forecasters. However, the lowest few hundred feet above the ocean, where a storm truly determines its desired strength, has largely gone unmeasured. Skimming that close to the water is too risky for a P-3 Orion. That layer remained a mystery for decades. That guess became somewhat less blind this year. NOAA’s operational Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System,…