The Deep Brief #11 | Friday 22nd August 2025
Your end-of-week ocean intelligence, built to inform, agitate, and equip you.
Each week, I pull together the most urgent, overlooked, and powerful stories shaping our relationship with the sea. It is unfiltered, sometimes uncomfortable, but most definitely unmissable.
Three deep dives. Three quick hits. One hard truth from the sea.
Deep Dives
A living glow on the ocean
For centuries, sailors spoke of ghostly “milky seas” that stretched for miles across the horizon. Now, scientists have revealed what really causes these rare events: vast swarms of luminous bacteria, numbering in the billions, glowing in unison. These living lights are not just ocean oddities. They may help us track microbial life at scale, offering clues about ocean productivity, carbon cycling, and the delicate balance of surface ecosystems.
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Exploring the last frontier
The deep sea remains Earth’s least understood wilderness, yet technology is catching up. From next-gen remotely operated vehicles inspired by the pulsing movement of moon jellyfish, to real-time live streams of expeditions led by pioneers like Katy Croff Bell, a new era of exploration is opening. These innovations could transform how we map ecosystems, discover new species, and set the baseline for protection before exploitation begins. The question is whether discovery will lead to stewardship or to extraction.
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Satellites under political fire
Satellites are our eyes on the climate. They track ocean heat, storm formation, and sea level rise with unparalleled precision. Yet new policy moves in the US are threatening to cut funding for NOAA’s satellite network, even as extreme weather intensifies worldwide. Without these tools, forecasts would be blinder, communities less prepared, and accountability for climate action weaker. Losing this view from above would leave humanity more vulnerable at the very moment we need clarity most.
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Three Quick Hits
Treaty talks resume
The UN Ocean Treaty is back on the table. Negotiations are resuming, with growing calls for strong high seas sanctuaries that could protect two-thirds of the global ocean from industrial exploitation.
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COVID’s underwater echo
New NOAA research shows the pandemic lockdowns offered a rare natural experiment in quieting the seas. With shipping slowed, researchers tracked how ocean soundscapes changed — and how marine life responded.
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Jellyfish-inspired tech
Engineers are designing underwater vehicles modeled on moon jellyfish, using their efficient, pulsing locomotion to travel deeper, quieter, and with less energy. Nature continues to be the best engineer.
Explore →
One Hard Truth
Ocean carbon storage: promise or peril?
As the race to cut carbon emissions falls behind schedule, investors are pouring money into ocean-based carbon storage projects. From sinking seaweed to injecting CO₂ into subsea rock formations, the ocean is being cast as both saviour and sink. Supporters say these technologies could buy humanity time by locking away billions of tonnes of carbon.
Yet scientists and campaigners warn that the risks are immense. Large-scale kelp sinking could starve surface ecosystems of nutrients. Artificially enhancing alkalinity could alter local chemistry in ways we barely understand. Deep-sea storage sites may leak, releasing CO₂ back into circulation while damaging fragile habitats. The ocean is not a dumping ground, and treating it as one risks repeating the mistakes of land-based geoengineering.
The hard truth is that carbon storage in the ocean is both seductive and dangerous. It promises climate relief but risks shifting harm out of sight and into ecosystems that cannot speak for themselves. The ocean does store carbon, it always has, but scaling it as a climate “solution” without ecological safeguards could trigger new crises. A safer future depends on cutting emissions at the source, not gambling on the ocean to absorb what we cannot control.
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Final Thought
The stories this week are about vision, what we can see, what we risk losing sight of, and what we choose to ignore. Satellites warn us of storms from above, bacteria light up the seas from within, and engineers build machines to dive deeper or spin with the tides. The ocean keeps revealing itself, layer by layer.
Yet vision without wisdom is dangerous. Carbon storage schemes, tidal turbines, even exploration itself, all carry risks if driven by urgency and profit rather than ecological intelligence. The ocean is not an empty stage for human experiments. It is alive, already running the most complex climate system on Earth.
If there’s one thread tying this week together, it is that our best chance lies in humility. Seeing more should mean interfering less. Listening closer should mean acting smarter. The ocean is speaking, in light, in sound, in storms. Whether we choose to understand it or to exploit it will define the next century.
Thank you to everyone who has become a Founding Member or paid subscriber this week. Your support means these stories are free for anyone, anywhere, no matter their geography or circumstances, because the truth about our ocean should never be locked behind a paywall.
See you next week.
– Luke
So glad to see you mention the carbon sink information. It feels, to me, as though we have already asked too much of the ocean in terms of dealing with our emissions. Now it's time for another approach.
A ticking time clock helps spur action, but also causes panic. Decisions made while in fight/flight rarely consider long-term consequences. It could be dangerous to choose the short term wins only to cause future problems. The Earth is not a business, where failures are repositioned as learning experiences. The cost is so much higher with the planet.