The ocean plays a key role in the global environment and the sustainability of human populations, especially because of its contribution to climate regulation and its provision of living and non-living resources. A healthy ocean in the Anthropocene requires a high-level understanding of the processes occurring in the marine environment, and their vulnerability and resilience to multiple drivers, pressures and stressors including climate change, sea-level rise, loss of biodiversity, eutrophication, acidification, hypoxia, chemical pollution, overfishing and deep-sea mining. The sustainable management of goods and services provided by the marine realm, and the human adaptive capacity for such management ought to be based, in part, on the knowledge derived from scientific research, which provides methodological approaches to assess and mitigate the impacts of global change and helps governance responses to reduce the vulnerability of marine-dependent communities. Current marine research is limited in fundamental ways: national and international support; the limited access to, or understanding of, indicators and proxies of change; the complexity of the human-ocean system; the fragmentation across research disciplines, the disconnect between scientific research and the policy-related decision making process or the local or regional management strategies; the often poor transfer of knowledge within different research communities and to society about key topics; the interplay between the issues at stake, the public's perception of these and many other current priorities. The session is convened by the IMBER project (www.imber.info), the Future Earth initiative (www.futureearth.info) and the Future Ocean Alliance (www.futureoceanalliance.org). This is highly interdisciplinary session that aims to gather natural and social scientists and help promote the dialogue between producers and consumers of knowledge required to tackle marine sustainability - one of the major global challenges we are currently facing in the Anthropocene.