August 27 - September 20, 2021: A team from the University of Washington Applied Physics Lab will carry out an expedition at the shelf break off the coast of Washington. The main goal of this expedition, funded by NOAA Ocean Exploration via the Fiscal Year 2020 Federal Funding Opportunity for Ocean Exploration, is to collect data for developing new acoustics-based methodologies that will pave the way for persistent, distributed observation of organisms that occupy the middle levels of the ocean food web (mid-trophic organisms), such as zooplankton and small fish, using gliders.

July 26 - August 1, 2021: From July 26 to August 1, 2021, a multi-institutional science team will set sail aboard the R/V Point Sur from Gulfport, Mississippi and head towards DeSoto Canyon. The objectives of this mission, funded by NOAA Ocean Exploration, are to deploy two different autonomous sensor platforms developed as part of this project: National Geographic Society’s Driftcam and the Teledyne Webb Research Slocum glider.

May 14 - May 27, 2021: From May 14 - 27, 2021, NOAA Ocean Exploration will lead the 2021 Technology Demonstration on NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer from Cape Canaveral, Florida, to Norfolk, Virginia. The expedition provides an opportunity to test several technologies that will allow the ocean exploration community to explore deeper, farther, and more comprehensively than previously possible.

January 2021: NOAA Ocean Exploration and the NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science partnered to create a publicly available spatial bibliography of Alaska deep waters in support of identifying exploration priorities in the region.

June 2020: NOAA announced it will formalize and expand its longstanding partnership with Schmidt Ocean Institute to explore, characterize and map the deep ocean and boost public understanding of the global ocean.

Fall 2019: In the fall of 2019, capitalizing on existing hydrographic survey contract mechanisms through NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey, NOAA Ocean Exploration and the National Oceanographic Partnership Program funded the geodata specialist company Fugro to conduct a survey in the Blake Plateau region off the coasts of Georgia and Florida.

July-August 2018: A multi-institutional science team will perform test deployments of two autonomous sampling platforms, the Driftcam and Slocum glider, in waters of the West Florida Shelf. These technologies may permit access to the deepwater habitats and allow the study of organisms that comprise scattering layers in the Gulf of Mexico without the need to interfere or capture the animals.

July-August 2018: NOAA and partners will conduct a telepresence-enabled ocean exploration technology expedition on NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer to demonstrate, test, and evaluate five emerging and existing technologies for possible integration into NOAA operations.

August 2018: A team from NOAA Ocean Exploration, Kraken Robotics Inc., and the University of Rhode Island Applied History Lab started a project to image, for the first time, all four of Rhode Island’s sunken historic submarines using a new Synthetic Aperture Sonar system.