The Ocean Genome Atlas Project marks five years as a science NGO in March of 2026. Over that time, OGAP voyaged over 15,000 nautical miles across the Atlantic from Holland to Uruguay, from Cape Horn transecting the Humboldt Current to Baja Mexico, across the Labrador Sea and along Greenland twice and from Alaska to the Channel Islands of California.

For three weeks in January 2025, OGAP joined a multinational and multidisciplinary team to conduct an extensive survey of the marine and terrestial biota of the Cape Horn Region. Invited by the Cape Horn International Center (CHIC,) the OGAP team sampled extensively in the Beagle Channel and throughout Islas Cabo de Hornos.

Over 2,472 nautical miles, OGAP conducted sampling along the Nova Scotia Coast, Newfoundland, the Labrador Sea and along the coast of Greenland. In the prime early spring plankton season

At the invitation of The Explorer’s Club, Co-Founders Dr. Leonid Moroz and Peter Molnar presented past and planned voyages to a full capacity of 125 in the club’s historic New York headquarters. We took the opportunity to share our vision of greatly expanding our knowledge of our oceans using advanced genomic techniques.

A full recording of the event can be found on The Explorer’s Club YouTube channel.

Common wisdom dictated that the cold waters of the BC coast may yield large populations of plankton but relatively low diversity of organisms - that “wisdom” could not have been more wrong. To quote Nobel Prize winner Sydney Brenner, “progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order.” The fjords and islands of BC may be vast nurseries of planktonic organisms that feed back into the larger ocean’s ecosystems.

Two weeks of intense and remote field work along western Vancouver Island proves that multifunctional and versatile mobile laboratories can be broadly used around the globe at very low cost to support the mission of researchers to better understand the mysteries of our oceans.

The Ocean Genome Atlas Project has purchased the Kanter 65 Te Mana, an all-oceans aluminum cutter designed by Mark Fitzgerald of CW Paine Yacht Design and built in Ontario Canada by Kanter Marine in 2006. High construction quality, impressive ship system design and the large aft stateroom and open cockpit are key building blocks for a refit into a first-in-class genomic research vessel.

OGAP Board Member Chris Fry sampling in the San Juan Islands supporting the FHL 472 Apprenticeship Marine Biodiversity Through the Lens of Single-Cell Genomics