Author: Derrick Lester

It’s important to note that most people are unfamiliar with bristlemouth fish, despite the fact that they may be among the most common vertebrates on Earth. They live in the mesopelagic zone, which is the middle layer of the ocean between 200 and 1,000 meters deep. Although their exact numbers are unknown, oceanographers regularly describe them as being massive. They have rows of light-producing organs called photophores running along their undersides, and they are small, black, and delicate. It has taken some time for scientists investigating specimens from U.S. West Coast Pacific seas to adequately characterize what they have discovered…

The map of Mars that is currently on your screen is most likely more comprehensive than any map of the same region on the ocean floor of Earth. That’s not exaggeration. The whole surface of Mars has been studied by orbiting spacecraft at resolutions that show objects a few meters broad, such as dust formations, lava tubes, craters, and old river courses. Since there is no ocean on the planet, radar and laser altimeters on satellites can measure the results from orbit by bouncing signals off the rock directly, covering millions of square kilometers per orbit and creating a comprehensive…

You can observe the effects of turbidity on water by standing at the harbor’s edge following a significant downpour. The harbor, which was rather clear the day before, is now brown-grey and thick with suspended soil that has been carried by the watershed’s accumulated grit and washed from upstream riverbanks and streets. When light strikes a surface, it doesn’t go very far. Visibility becomes almost nonexistent a few centimeters in. The water appears to be opaque. This is the most obvious form of turbidity; it is transient, coastal, and quite simple to see. A larger-scale variant of this phenomenon occurs…

When a remotely operated vehicle was roaming the bottom close to Darwin Island in the Galápagos in 2015, it stumbled across something that the scientists viewing the camera feed couldn’t quite classify. The creature was tiny, about the size of a golf ball, and it was perched on the sediment at a depth of 1,800 meters. That was an odd, but not exceptional, section. The hue was what caught people’s attention. It was a blue creature. Instead of the drab brownish-grey that deep-sea cephalopods typically wear as a sort of non-color at depths where sunlight doesn’t reach, they have a…

You are probably familiar with the scent of rotting sargassum if you have visited a Caribbean beach in recent years. It’s okay, the floating mats have sustained ecosystems for millions of years, but not when it’s drifting offshore in its natural state. It creates hydrogen sulfide at proportions that clear hotel terraces, close beaches, and, at high enough levels, actually cause respiratory discomfort when it washes ashore in the amounts already arriving on beaches from Barbados to the Yucatán, lies in the sun for a few days, and begins to degrade. The scent is overpowering. It is the stench of…

Somewhere in the Pacific, an autonomous underwater vehicle is carefully navigating an 80-meter-deep reef slope as its cameras are constantly filming everything that comes into view. A tiny fish floats by, looking unimpressive from a distance. It is pale and somewhat translucent, and it is hovering close to a sponge-like structure. It is recorded by the car. In a matter of seconds, a computer vision model back on the research vessel analyzes the frame, identifies the fish as a possible match for a genus that hasn’t been documented in this ocean basin, and compares the fish’s morphology against a database…

Researchers from Newcastle University discovered polychlorinated biphenyls at quantities fifty times greater than those observed in crabs residing in severely contaminated river estuaries in China when they removed amphipods from the Mariana Trench in 2017 and analyzed their tissue chemically. These crustaceans contained PCBs from industrial activity that had been outlawed for decades in the majority of nations. They had sunk slowly thru eleven kilometers of water from the surface world, where they had come from manufacturing facilities, landfills, and the typical effluent of industrial civilization, to gather in the fat tissue of animals that lived in total darkness at…

The deep ocean is assumed to be slow in the majority of climate debates. Photographs and headlines can depict how the surface churns, hurricanes form, and sea levels rise. However, things are meant to move on geological timescales, not human ones, at depths of 2,000 and 4,000 meters. We’re changing that presumption. Additionally, there are some unsettling ramifications to the modification. Ice is the link between deep-ocean current dynamics and surface warming. The meltwater entering the ocean is fresh, lighter, and less dense than the cold, salty water that propels thermohaline circulation, as the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets lose…

For a very long time, the ocean has been helping the climate, mostly unnoticed. Roughly 25% of the carbon dioxide that human activity releases into the atmosphere is absorbed annually by the world’s seas. This massive, silent service is powered by basic physics and marine biology and doesn’t require infrastructure, subsidies, or political consent to work. The idea that this function will continue has formed the foundation of climate projections. It didn’t entirely in 2023. Even scientists who had been observing ocean warming data for decades were taken aback by the regularity with which sea surface temperatures in non-polar ocean…

Waiting for results for eight years is a long time. That is effectively a whole grant cycle in the research sector, with nothing to show between the time you deploy your equipment and the time you find out if it was successful. This was known in advance by the California Academy of Sciences team that deployed thirteen monitoring structures to the seafloor off Guam. At depths of up to 100 meters, the devices—stacks of PVC plates intended to serve as tiny artificial reefs—were positioned and left there. No cameras are present. Nobody is checking in. Only time, the ocean, and…