About
Fathom is an independent, grant- and donation-funded deep-sea research institute, operating a single vessel since 2017.
A small vessel, a small footprint, on purpose.
Fathom began in 2017 with one converted trawler and a conviction that deep-sea research didn't need a navy-scale budget to be rigorous. We still run a single vessel.
Every dive is logged publicly — depth, findings, and the ones that came back with nothing. Null results are still results, and we don't bury them to keep a clean record.
- Single research vessel, rotating six-person watch crew
- Every finding — including null results — published within 90 days
- No commercial sponsor holds rights to any discovery
What changes as you go down.
Every dive passes through the same five layers. The deeper we go, the less anyone actually knows.
The sunlit layer
Where most ocean life and nearly all research funding concentrates. We pass through it in minutes on the way down and rarely stop to look — the surveys here are already well covered.
The twilight zone
Light fades to nothing by the bottom of this band. Most of our bioluminescence surveys happen here — organisms producing their own light because none is coming from above.
The midnight zone
Permanent darkness, near-freezing water, crushing pressure. Fathom's standard operating depth for wreck and geology surveys sits in the upper half of this band.
The abyssal plain
Flat, sediment-covered, and mostly unmapped at any real resolution. Our deepest confirmed dive — 4,001 meters — sits right at this zone's upper edge.
The trenches
Beyond Fathom's current vessel capability. We log candidate sites here for future expeditions with better-funded partners, but haven't dived it ourselves — yet.
Nine people, one vessel.
Fathom runs one vessel with one rotating watch crew — no back office, no second team.
R. Solheim
T. Okonkwo
M. Duvall
A. Kessler
H. Nakashima
E. Boateng
S. Marchetti
J. Whitfield
C. Reyes
We log every dive, successful or not.
Follow the current expedition, or help fund the next one — Fathom is crowd- and grant-funded, with no commercial sponsor attached to any finding.