Continental Shelf
Kelp forests, cold-water corals and the daily vertical migration — the busiest layer of the ocean, seen from inside. First dive at 06:00, alongside the plankton.
See the berthsSector 01 · Choose your depth
Three expeditions. Three depths.
Every expedition carries a full science team and publishes its dataset under an open licence within a year. You join as crew, not as a passenger.
Abyssal Plain
The midnight zone. Benthic sleds, baited cameras and the great detritus fall. This is where most of the planet's seafloor actually lives — and almost none of it has been named.
See the berthsHadal TrenchFlagship
Challenger Deep and the trenches beyond. A three-week campaign with a full-ocean-depth lander, two manned dives and 90 hours of hadal video nobody has seen yet.
See the berthsSector 02 · The fleet
Built for the pressure.
Two ships and a submersible — designed for deep work, run by a crew that has been diving together for a decade.
R/V-01
Research vessel
R/V Alcyone
The mother ship — wet and dry labs, a moon pool, the deep-sea lander hangar and berths for thirty-two. Alcyone has crossed every ocean basin since 2014.
- Length
- 86 m
- Lander depth
- 12,000 m
- Crew
- 32
- Payload
- 420 t
- Cruise
- 12 kn
DSRV-02
Manned submersible
DSRV Bathynaut
Three seats, one titanium sphere, ninety-plus dives past nine thousand metres. Bathynaut is the only civilian submersible certified to the full depth of the ocean.
- Length
- 7.2 m
- Max depth
- 10,928 m
- Crew
- 3
- Payload
- 300 kg
- Cruise
- 2.5 kn
AUV-03
Autonomous surveyor
AUV Lamprey
The quiet mapper — a torpedo of sensors that runs 210-kilometre grids while the humans sleep. Lamprey drew the first continuous maps of two hadal escarpments.
- Length
- 4.1 m
- Max depth
- 6,000 m
- Crew
- 0
- Payload
- 120 kg
- Cruise
- 4 kn
Sector 03 · Field science
Science the surface can't see.
Every expedition ships a research question. A few of the ones we keep returning to.
Hydrothermal vents
Chemosynthesis
In 1977, nobody believed an ecosystem could live without sunlight. The vent fields we survey still rewrite the textbooks — tube worms, yeti crabs, microbes that eat rock.
400 °C vent fluids
2 m tube worm colonies
Bioluminescence
Light in the dark
Three quarters of the animals in the deep make their own light. We map the patterns, the colours and the timing — and we have only just begun to catalogue them.
92% of deep species glow
3,412 species catalogued
Carbon pump
The ocean's memory
The deep is the planet's largest carbon store. What sinks, stays. Our sediment cores trace 800,000 years of climate — and tell us what we are doing to it now.
38 Gt CO₂ absorbed yearly
800 kyr of archived climate
Sector 04 · The log
Expedition log, 2024–2026.
Raw entries from the ships — dates, depths and what came back up with us.
14 May 2026−10,928 m
Trench-6, Mariana
Full-ocean-depth lander returned with the first images of a hadal snailfish swarm at 10,700 metres. Forty-one new observations logged before the batteries died.
02 Feb 2026−4,050 m
Guaymas Basin
Baited cameras recorded a forty-minute aggregation of yeti crabs at a new vent field. Samples under analysis in Bergen.
17 Sep 2025−6,000 m
Kermadec Trench
AUV Lamprey completed a 210-kilometre grid — the first continuous map of a hadal fault escarpment, made while the surface crew slept.
03 Apr 2025−1,200 m
Porcupine Seabight
Cold-water coral garden, four hectares, previously unmapped. Proposed to the regional marine park authority for protection.
We go down because the answers are down there. Every time we come back, the map of the planet has changed a little — and that little is enormous.
Sector 05 · Support the dives
Fund a berth, or take one.
Berths sell out months ahead. Fellowships fund the science berths we keep open for researchers who can't pay their own way.
Citizen
€9 / month
Underwrite a water sample.
- Monthly dive log, straight from the ship
- Species of the month, photographed on board
- Your name in the expedition credits
Fellow
€49 / month
Fund a full science berth.
- Everything in Citizen
- Live comms during manned dives
- Quarterly Q&A with the science crew
- Your name on a dive of the season
Patron
€240 / month
Fund a full lander mission.
- Everything in Fellow
- Dedicated access to raw datasets
- Priority berth reservation
- A mission named after you, painted on a vessel
Sector 06 · The crew
The people who go down.
Dr. Ingrid Sørensen
Chief scientist · marine biology
Capt. Mateo Ríos
Expedition captain · R/V Alcyone
Dr. Amara Okafor
Geochemist · sediment cores
Lin Wei
Submersible pilot · Bathynaut
Sector 07 · Small print
Asked on deck.
None. Every berth includes a two-week training package before you board, and on the ship you are crew — you learn the watches, the sampling and the cameras from the people who do this professionally. The only requirement is being comfortable at sea.
Our submersible is certified to 11,000 m and has made ninety-plus dives past 9,000 m without a critical incident. Every dive follows a written plan, a dedicated surface team and a 72-hour pre-dive checklist. The ocean is not safe; we make the operation as safe as engineering allows.
It is published openly within twelve months — raw sensor logs, video, sample metadata — under a CC-BY licence. You get early access as crew, and your name goes in the dataset credits.
Yes. Up to 90 days before departure you are refunded in full; up to 30 days, 50%. If the ship can't sail — weather, politics, a pandemic — you are refunded entirely and offered priority for the next season.
Shelf berths start at €4,200, Abyssal at €9,800 and Hadal at €18,500 — all-inclusive: ship, training, meals, dive time and insurance. Fellowships cover the science berths, never the paid ones.
Quarterly · Free
The Dive Log
Four letters a year from the ships: expedition stories, raw data highlights and the species we met. Written by the crew, at sea.