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…
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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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…
A simulation with no obvious conclusion is being conducted on servers in a data center in Brussels. The simulation is the ocean, or at least as near to a useful approximation of it as any computing system has yet tried. Satellite altimetry data from Copernicus and bathymetric surveys gathered over decades by research vessels from twelve European nations are being combined with temperature gradients collected by sensors on the North Sea seabed. The end product is a living, updateable model of the marine environment that can be queried, altered, and run forward in time to find out what happens next.…
Modernizing the deep-sea mining licensing framework under a domestic statute that dates back to 1980 is a regulatory process that most people in Washington have hardly noticed, but staff members at NOAA’s Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management in Silver Spring, Maryland, have been working thru. The procedure is silent, detailed, and presented in a purposefully bureaucratic manner. In actuality, it amounts to the United States getting ready to approve the commercial extraction of polymetallic nodules from international seabed regions without consulting the organization that the rest of the world acknowledges as having jurisdiction over just that. The multilateral…
With the casual efficiency of an animal that has done this ten thousand times, a harbor seal on a California research pier surfaces with a fish in its mouth and hauls itself onto a floating platform. What transpired during the dive is less observable from any reasonable distance. The water in which the fish had been swimming just prior to the seal’s arrival was still in motion, with tiny vortices and pressure waves spinning off the fish’s tail in patterns that continued in the water long after the fish had changed course. The fish escaped the seal’s notice. The water…
The sediment contains a chemistry that took millions of years to stabilize in the nearly freezing water of the abyssal plain, far below the surface of the Central Pacific. It’s not noticeable, it’s not spectacular, and it doesn’t look like what you see in pictures of marine life. It’s chemical—dissolved metals bound to organic molecules in the water that fill the voids between the grains of sediment, an equilibrium system that the organisms that live in and on that sediment have adapted to throughout geological time. In ways that the scientific community is just starting to comprehend, polymetallic nodule mining…
The devices that scrape the ocean floor don’t appear to be the type of machinery that permanently alters ecosystems. They are unglamorous: mechanical rakes slicing thru material that hasn’t been disturbed in geological time, hefty dredge heads dragging behind ships, and suction pipes drawing sediment up from the bottom. What they’re doing is imperceptible from the surface. It’s total from below. Every year, between 4 and 8 billion tons of marine sediment are extracted worldwide. This figure includes a variety of activities, such as the deeper seabed mining operations that have garnered the most recent regulatory attention, offshore sand extraction…