Kicking off the OTZ project

Mission Overview

With the start of the Ocean Twilight Zone project in April 2018, we immediately set our sights on summer and the chance to kick off our research program aboard the National Marine Fisheries research ship Henry B. Bigelow. The Audacious Award enabled Andone Lavery to accelerate development of Deep-See and make its first deployment from the ship a success. Deep-See completed five dives and produced over 20 terabytes of data that included 500,000 ultra-high definition holographic images of life in the twilight zone. Upon returning to Woods Hole, Lavery gave a debrief on the cruise that began with her saying, “We have to completely rethink what we know about the twilight zone.” In oceanography, that depth of revelatory insight only comes from one thing: taking knowledgeable scientists and experienced engineers to sea.