Research
Questions we are trying to answer.
Aethon does not intend to replace ocean science. It intends to make the gaps in it legible, and to help direct effort at the places where an observation would change the most.
Biology & ecosystems
What lives down there, and how much of it has never been described?
About ~240,000 marine species have been formally described (World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), 2024). Estimates of the true total vary widely, which is itself the finding: we do not know the size of what we have not catalogued.
Geology & hydrothermal systems
What is the structure beneath the seafloor, and where is it active?
Vents, seeps, spreading centres and the chemistry around them — the places where the planet's interior meets its ocean, and where the instruments we have are least adequate.
Environmental monitoring
What is changing, how fast, and against what baseline?
Temperature, chemistry, oxygen and currents over time. Most ocean measurements are single points in time; the value is in the series, not the sample.
Mapping & geophysics
How much of the seafloor is genuinely mapped, and at what resolution?
Roughly a quarter of the seafloor has been mapped to modern resolution (Seabed 2030, 2024) — and resolution varies enormously between those areas.
How a claim earns the word “finding”.
The ocean produces genuinely strange observations. Aethon treats those as questions, not conclusions — and an unresolved observation stays labelled unresolved until it clears all five of these.
- 01Repeatable measurement, with instruments and precision recorded.
- 02Multiple independent sensors before a claim is made.
- 03Conventional explanations tested first, and documented when they fit.
- 04Independent review by people who did not collect the data.
- 05Published provenance — who observed it, when, with what.
Working with us
If you hold ocean data, run a programme, or have a question that needs observations nobody has collected yet, we want to hear about it.