Odyssey Marine Exploration

For centuries, the ocean has been and remains the only reliable route for transporting goods and cargo around the world. Although humans have learned to sail with the tide, they have never managed to conquer the ocean — powerful storms continue to destroy huge and technologically complex sea vessels.

The mystery hidden at the bottom of the world's oceans for centuries could not remain unsolved for long for the brave adventurers who founded Odyssey Marine Exploration in 1994. Now, with the help of advanced technology and robotics, they have been able to push the boundaries, diving deeper and further into places no one had ever dreamed of.

Today, Odyssey Marine Exploration is a world leader in deposit development and has completed numerous projects around the world.

The company's main focus is on exploring deep-sea areas using innovative methods and modern technologies to discover and extract minerals and other minerals from the seabed. At the same time, an innate passion for the unknown drives the company's employees to explore not only deposits — the company is also the exclusive organisation for searching for shipwrecks and recovering valuable cargo.

Odyssey Marine Exploration has assembled a team of professionals consisting of geologists, biologists, oceanographers, chemists, engineers and technicians who have extensive knowledge of sulphide, phosphorite, polymetallic and manganese resources on the seabed at depths of up to 6,000 metres.

The organisation's expert team has surveyed and mapped more than 26,000 square kilometres of the seabed and logged more than 14,000 hours of dives to the ocean floor, discovering hundreds of shipwrecks from the historical period from the 3rd century BC to the victims of World War II. The most famous finds were the sunken ships SS Republic, HMS Victory, SS Gairsoppa, SS Central America and La Marquis de Tourny.

Of course, none of this would have been possible without ships and technology. The flagship of the Odyssey Marine Exploration research centre is the Odyssey Explorer. Once a cable-laying vessel, it has now been extensively modernised and is equipped with first-class research equipment. Its instruments can see what other ships cannot.

Odyssey Explorer research ship

The Odyssey Explorer team has access to expensive, state-of-the-art equipment for searching for deposits, including an 8-tonne, $4 million Zeus remote-controlled manipulator with a vacuum system and a small, manoeuvrable deep-sea vehicle called Clio.

Checking the Zeus underwater vehicle

Zeus deep-sea remote-controlled vehicle

Underwater capture

All underwater robot operations are controlled and monitored from the operator's cabin located on the upper deck.

The lower deck is responsible for navigation. The ship's log is also kept here. This is where navigators collect data from each site. Not far from here is the analytical control centre, where experienced underwater archaeologists work, knowing that finding treasure is a rare stroke of luck, because every ship has its own history and its own tragedy.

Remote device with high-resolution photo and video equipment

Manoeuvrable remote device Clio

Found artefact - a weapon from the battleship HMS Victory, 1744

Odyssey Marine Exploration gained worldwide fame in 2007 when it discovered the wreck of a Spanish galleon and recovered gold bars worth $500 million. This is the largest sunken treasure ever found.

Remote underwater manipulator

48 tonnes of gold bars found on the sunken steamship SS Gairsoppa

Odyssey Marine Exploration prides itself on the quality of its marine archaeological work. It is not about the treasures recovered, but about the quest to uncover history. There is an ocean of treasures out there, and someone has to find them.