In the middle of the Atlantic, somewhere over a section of seafloor that no human eye has ever directly seen, a certain kind of silence descends upon a ship deck at four in the morning. For years, the NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer has lowered Deep Discoverer, its remotely operated vehicle, into that silence while a live feed beams images of creatures that resemble rejected concept art rather than biology. However, something changed on that ship beginning in 2021. Scientists started sketching water, which is far less dramatic to look at, alongside the cameras. It turns out that the footage might…
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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Fortaleza is located on the northeastern coast of Brazil, where the Atlantic Ocean stretches far enough into the horizon to cease appearing like water and begin to resemble a fact of the cosmos. In a way, it’s a suitable environment for discussing how little we truly understand about what’s underneath all that blue. No camera has ever been able to reach the seafloor somewhere out there, and in most newsrooms, that doesn’t really bother anyone. A new workshop is attempting to bridge that gap. Recently, the Internews-run Earth Journalism Network announced a practical training program for Brazilian journalists in Fortaleza…
It’s really hard to put into words what it’s like for a researcher to watch a 3D laser scan of a gelatinous deep-sea creature rotate slowly on a screen for the first time—something that has never been seen by human eyes before. Not precisely excitement. More akin to vertigo. Although the ocean has always been enormous, we’re starting to realize how much we’ve been missing recently due to the convergence of satellite technology and precise mapping tools. Our maps of the ocean floor were embarrassingly crude for decades. With some discomfort, scientists have noted that we have charted Mars’ surface…
The deep ocean has a subtle, unsettling quality that is difficult to describe. It’s not frightening per se, but rather humbling. Nobody was entirely certain of what a research team would discover when they descended into the Celebes Sea for the first time in 2007, using a remote-operated vehicle to guide them more than 9,000 feet below the surface south of the Philippine Islands. What returned altered the discourse about the true nature of life on Earth. A jellyfish that is black. A clear sea cucumber. A tentacled worm that was not a squid but moved like one. Scientists from…
When results are better than anticipated, a certain kind of silence descends upon a research lab. It’s more like a held breath, a group pause before someone says, “Okay, let’s look at this again,” rather than a celebration. That’s probably what happened when researchers studying Manila clam larvae found something they hadn’t fully expected: mothers who had been exposed to harsh, acidic ocean conditions were somehow preparing their offspring to survive those same conditions better than offspring from mothers who had never experienced them at all. The study, which was carried out with funding from NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program and…
The notion that the ocean floor was already aware of what was about to happen is subtly unnerving. A microscopic organism that lives almost a thousand meters below the sea surface appears to have been adjusting, recalibrating, and preparing while climate summits have dragged on for decades and carbon pledges have been made, broken, and remade. Not because it recognized the danger. However, it didn’t have to in a biological sense. Nitrosopumilus maritimus is the name of the unglamorous microbe in question. It lacks the visual appeal of a polar bear on a receding ice shelf or a bleached coral…
Reading a scientific report where each and every number is worse than the one before it causes a certain kind of dread. Sitting with the 2025 State of the Global Climate report, which is supported by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information and jointly released by the World Meteorological Organization, is about like that. It’s not as dramatic as disaster movies. In some ways, it’s more eerie and quieter than that. A generation ago, the headline figure—2025 ranking as the second or third hottest year since records began in 1850, sitting roughly 1.43°C above the pre-industrial average—would have seemed astounding.…
Elise Allen is likely to remember this particular moment. During the spawning survey last winter, she reached down to steady herself while wading through the Upper Noyo watershed. She took one cautious step before feeling a tremendous surge from under her boot. A male coho measuring 70 centimeters leaped between her legs and vanished upstream. “I think I almost had a heart attack,” she subsequently admitted. Now it’s a humorous tale. However, it also speaks to the reality of what’s occurring in the rivers along California’s Mendocino Coast: fish are returning in numbers that seem almost unbelievable. Monitoring teams estimated…
Three large round moorings are situated on the ocean floor in a rough triangle more than 2.5 miles below the surface of the Gulf of Alaska. They have been silently performing their duties for decades, gathering data on temperature, salinity, pressure, water chemistry, and nutrient concentrations and sending it back to researchers on land. They are never photographed. Their appearance isn’t especially dramatic. However, the data they have collected over time has influenced scientists’ understanding of a wide range of topics, including fisheries, climate patterns, and the marine heatwaves that have devastated Pacific ecosystems. Papa, that’s Ocean Station. Additionally, it…
Right now, reading NOAA’s 2025 accomplishments report has a subtly eerie quality. Instead, what should seem like a simple institutional summary—satellites monitoring storms, ocean buoys providing data streams, research labs generating the climate projections that farmers, insurers, and military planners silently rely on—reads like a list of what America is about to give up. It is impossible to overlook the timing. The majority of people only indirectly interact with the infrastructure that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has spent decades developing. When an airline changes its route to avoid a developing low-pressure system, when a coastal city engineer determines…