The oceans contain 1,335 million km 3 of water covering 361.9 million km 2 of seafloor across 71% of the planet. In the past few decades, there has been substantial effort put into mapping and exploring the ocean fueled by the advent of new technologies that more easily enable deepwater access. However, we are still far from achieving our shared goals of a well characterized and documented ocean. In 2010, Webb et al. documente...

A minuscule fraction of the deep sea has been scientifically explored and characterized due to several constraints, including expense, inefficiency, exclusion, and the resulting inequitable access to tools and resources around the world. To meet the demand for understanding the largest biosphere on our planet, we must accelerate the pace and broaden the scope of exploration by adding low-cost, scalable tools to the traditional...

The Phoenix Archipelago in the Central Pacific is situated in what was once one of the most productive areas for capturing sperm whales ( Physeter macrocephalus ). These whales were the focal targets of American offshore whalers in the mid-19th century along the equator, an area known as the “on-the-line” whaling grounds. Now, as large-scale Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) have provided protection for marine mammals and their fo...