NOAA Ocean Exploration is making annotations of biological occurrence data (observations and samples) from expeditions on NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer available in global databases for the first time.

Can we learn about life in the deep ocean even if we don’t see it? Yes we can. Thanks to environmental DNA (eDNA), we no longer need a visual sighting to know what’s been in the neighborhood. NOAA ...

The hazy silhouette of Guam coming into view at sunrise on the morning of our last day at sea. Image courtesy of NOAA Ocean Exploration, 2025 Beyond the Blue: Palau Mapping 2. Download largest version ...

From March 17-27, 2025, NOAA Ocean Exploration and partners will conduct a telepresence-enabled expedition on NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer in deep waters off Hawai‘i. During the Beyond the Blue: 2025 ...

Bathymetry is the underwater equivalent to topography–the study of surface terrain like hills and valleys on land. Just like dry land, the surface of the seafloor is not always flat. The seafloor can ...

Covering 6.4 million acres, an area larger than Vermont, an underwater seascape of cold-water coral mounds offshore the southeast United States coast has been deemed the largest deep-sea coral reef ...

Ocean exploration is vital for mapping and characterizing geologic features and biologic communities in the ocean, some of which have not been previously described. However, the impacts of ocean ...

A sub-bottom profiler is a type of sonar system – a geophysical survey tool that uses sound to map beneath the seafloor. Low-frequency pulses of sound are aimed toward the seafloor, where some pulses ...

From May through September 2023, NOAA and partners conducted a series of telepresence-enabled ocean exploration expeditions on NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer to improve knowledge about unexplored and ...

Oxygen minimum zones are persistent layers in the water column that have low oxygen concentration due to biological, chemical, and physical processes. As oceans warm, oxygen minimum zones increase in ...

Cold seeps are relatively stable, long-lived places in the ocean where hydrocarbon-rich fluid that is of a similar temperature to surrounding water seeps up from cracks in the seafloor while ...

Del 6 al 19 de abril de 2022, un equipo de investigadores utilizará tecnologías emergentes para explorar los hábitats de aguas profundas en las costas de Puerto Rico que han sido poco explorados, pero ...