Madeira: A Global Deep-Sea Research Hub in the Atlantic

Today, deep-sea research is expensive, largely limiting this science to countries and institutes with the greatest resourcing. Such efforts have been critical to expanding our knowledge of the deep, yet we still know too little to make time-sensitive decisions about resource use, protection and responsible interactions with the deep.

We need more people doing deep-sea research, and we need to do it efficiently and cost-effectively. Our ocean, our efforts to preserve our planet and the well-being of our coastal communities depend on it. 

How do we do this? We believe one of the answers lies around a small island chain in the North Atlantic.

The Madeira Archipelago, an autonomous region of Portugal, is a series of volcanic islands with steep slopes diving straight into the deep sea. Within a few kilometers from shore, ocean depths already reach 500-1,000m. Another dozen kilometers and depths reach over 3,000m. Thanks to Madeira’s relatively calm seas and mild climate, these depths are also accessible to researchers year-round by small boats. 

Madeira does not have the economic might to finance state-of-the-art deep-sea research equipment and expeditions as do the world’s leading research institutions. Only through creativity and collaboration can we take advantage of our island’s special access and begin to discover and democratize the deep.  

MARE-Madeira, the largest non-profit aquatic research institute in Madeira, is working with partners at the Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel (GEOMAR) and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) to do just that. Funded by the European Commission Horizon Europe program and within the project TWILIGHTED (TWInning Laboratory for an Innovative, Global Hub To Explore the Deep), we are working to strengthen deep-sea research capacity in Madeira, to develop lower-cost methods for exploring and monitoring deeper waters and, ultimately, to create a global hub for deep-sea research on the island. 

Whether you have deep-sea experience or not, and especially those from small islands and institutes that have been financially restricted from participating in deep-sea research in the past, we invite you to join our capacity-building journey. Follow us on social media, use the how-to guides for low-cost tools we’ll share on our website and sign up to our Impossible Things Workshops or International Twilighted Conference. We hope to engage more fully in this important and globally underfunded area of research in the coming years and together help build a future where deep-sea research is done more efficiently, more quickly and even more collaboratively.

Funding acknowledgement: The TWILIGHTED project is funded by the European Commission’s Horizon EuropeTwinning program.