Author: Derrick Lester

Three farm dogs named Honey, Junior, and Roxy were keeping watch over over a thousand sheep that were sprawled out in the shade of a utility-scale solar array in Lancaster, Kentucky, on a recent afternoon. It’s the kind of scene that falls somewhere between a power plant, a farm, and something else entirely. Additionally, it is becoming much less uncommon than it once was. Many people still find the idea of placing cattle under solar panels to be somewhat ridiculous. Cows are big. They make scratches on objects. They rely on fences. They were dismissed for years as being too…

The Ursa Major was supposed to be a ghost, one of those freighters flying the Russian flag that traverses oceans without drawing much attention. Constructed in 2009 and operating under sanctions since 2022, it has operated the so-called Syrian Express for years, transporting equipment to and from Tartus. However, by December 2024, there appeared to be a problem with its departure from St. Petersburg. The path was incorrect. The load was substantial. In retrospect, the manifest appears almost absurdly thin: 129 empty shipping containers, two cranes, and two “manhole covers.” It turns out that those manhole covers were parts of…

Every summer, a common sight can be seen in city parks, backyards, and beaches: people sprawling across the grass as if they’ve been knocked flat by an invisible force. By late afternoon, your eyelids feel heavy even though you spent a few hours outside doing nothing more demanding than reading a paperback or chatting over lemonade. The couch is what the body wants. It’s a strange kind of tiredness, the kind that doesn’t quite fit the day you’ve had. The answer is surprisingly multi-layered for something so prevalent. In this case, the sun itself isn’t the antagonist. It’s heat. The…

In Branson, it is just after midnight, the temperature is 73 degrees, there is no wind, and the humidity has risen to 100%. The Ozarks settle into a heavy, almost held-breath quality before a summer storm decides whether or not to actually arrive. This is the kind of stillness that people who live close to Table Rock Lake recognize without looking at a screen. Monday’s high is predicted to be close to 90, and the heat index is expected to rise to 98. Before nine in the morning, showers and thunderstorms could occur; after two in the afternoon, perhaps. In…

When the sky can’t decide what it wants, the air in St. Louis feels a certain way. Heavy, damp, and preventing something. It’s the kind of humidity that sticks to your skin before you’ve even made it to your car, and you can feel it as soon as you step outside on a Monday morning in early June. In this area, the forecast of 84 degrees and the possibility of showers hardly qualifies as news. Locals dismiss it with a shrug. They know that worse is likely to come because they have witnessed worse. June’s effects on the Gateway City…

The peculiarity of sun poisoning is its delayed onset. You tell yourself that a cool shower will take care of the sting as you leave the beach feeling fine, though perhaps a little pink across your shoulders. Your body then begins to send different signals at around hour six. An inexplicable headache. The room is warm, but there’s an odd chill. The skin constricts until it no longer feels like a typical burn. Physicians will tell you that the name is deceptive. There isn’t any real poison. A severe sunburn combined with a sort of systemic revolt—a reaction so strong…

Around 9:15 on Sunday night, the text message arrived—the kind of warning that causes people in this region of the nation to set down their forks and move in the direction of a window. Northwest of Beresford, a small town in Lincoln County that most outsiders couldn’t locate on a map, a massive and extremely dangerous tornado was on the ground. Leola basements were flooding by 9:40. In the interim, the KELOLAND Storm Center emerged as South Dakota’s most significant screen for a few hours. On the northern plains, severe weather coverage follows a certain pattern, and it’s difficult to…

A small team of marine biologists is working on a project that would have seemed slightly ridiculous ten years ago, somewhere along the coast in La Jolla, in a building that smells slightly of warm electronics and salt. From a desk, they are observing coral reefs. Instead of using a livestream or a porthole, millions of underwater photos were used to create dense, multi-layered, three-dimensional reconstructions. This idea has been pursued for years by Scripps’ Sandin Lab, and it’s possible that technology has finally caught up to the ambition. It’s difficult to ignore the numbers. Each dive returns about 350…

A space agency lowering itself into the ocean has a subtly ridiculous quality. For the past few years, NASA—the organization most people associate with rockets and red planets—has been developing robots that descend rather than ascend. Martian dust or lunar regolith are not the destination. Pressure can crush a steel sphere like a soda can in the hadal zone, the area of the ocean named after the Greek underworld. You begin to see why this makes sense when you stand on the deck of a research ship such as the Nautilus. From above, the ocean does not appear strange. However,…

The ocean changes completely somewhere around 500 miles southeast of Hawaii, far below the warm surface where tourists snorkel and tuna boats trawl. At about 650 feet, sunlight becomes less intense. It disappears at 3,000 feet. At about 12,000 feet, you come to an abyssal plain the size of the continental United States. Continue on, past creatures that glow slightly in the cold. Almost no one on Earth has ever seen the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Nearly nine out of ten species down there, according to scientists, have never been given names. Nevertheless, this is the area where world leaders are currently…