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…
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 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,…
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…
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…