E/V Nautilus Begins 20-Day Survey of Deep-Sea Habitats Around Hawaiʻi
The Ocean Exploration Trust’s E/V Nautilus has begun a 20-day expedition to map previously unmapped deep-sea habitats around Hawaiʻi and within Papahānaumokuākea National Marine Sanctuary.
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The Ocean Exploration Trust’s E/V Nautilus departed on September 22 for a 20-day expedition to survey previously unmapped deep-sea habitats around Hawaiʻi and inside Papahānaumokuākea National Marine Sanctuary. The mission, designed to combine seafloor mapping with remotely operated vehicle exploration and dives planned to reach 6,000 metres, is aimed at turning an area that is still largely represented by gaps on a map into something scientists can examine directly.
The expedition is listed as NA182, “Deep-Sea Habitats of the Hawaiian Archipelago,” and is scheduled to run from September 22 through October 12, 2026. Its mission plan calls for mapping the seafloor and using the E/V Nautilus’s ROV to investigate deep-sea environments, pairing broad surveys with close observations of habitats that have not previously been documented.
That combination matters because mapping and observation answer different questions. A map can show the shape and extent of a feature, while an ROV can inspect the habitat itself, collect imagery, and provide the detail needed to understand what lives there and how those communities are arranged. The expedition’s equipment is being used to connect those two scales rather than treating an unmapped patch of ocean as merely an empty space.
The planned dives will take the vehicle into depths of up to 6,000 metres, putting parts of the Hawaiian Archipelago’s deep seafloor within reach of cameras and scientific instruments. The work is being carried out with participating scientific institutions, whose researchers will use the surveys to pursue the expedition’s broader goals of documenting habitats and improving understanding of the deep waters around the islands.
Papahānaumokuākea is not simply a destination on the route. Including the national marine sanctuary places the expedition inside an area where the value of the work lies partly in establishing what is there before the habitat can be studied in detail. The resulting maps and observations should provide a clearer baseline for future research in the sanctuary and around the wider Hawaiian Archipelago.
For the crew aboard Nautilus, the expedition is therefore less a single discovery mission than a sustained effort to make an unfamiliar environment legible: map the terrain, send the ROV into selected locations, and record what the deep sea is actually like. Twenty days is a short interval against the scale of the ocean, but it is enough to replace another section of blank seafloor with evidence.