Drop
NEREID is dropped into a chosen part of the ocean.
Deep-Sea Conservation Atlas
Drag to rotate the globe. Explore famed shipwrecks, visit research vessels and their example sensor readouts, and trace the migrations of the sea's most vulnerable wildlife — all on one rotating world.
02 · Cryptic Telemetry
An interactive console for the ocean's most elusive species — the deep-dwelling, rarely-sighted, and critically rare. Select a species to view its profile and an example tracking record.
03 · Open Data
Where scientists find real ocean data. Each card describes a kind of dataset and links to the public repository that maintains it.
04 · The Codex
Peer-reviewed projections, an open reading list, and field dispatches from the scientists working at the frontier of ocean discovery.
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05 · Stewardship
Conservation is a collective expedition. Support the organizations defending the deep sea — and change the everyday habits that decide its future.
Phytoplankton generate over half of Earth's oxygen. Protecting the sea is protecting ourselves.
↑ Return to the Atlas06 · The Mission
The Blue Mile Project is an ocean-health initiative, founded and directed by a 12-year-old, built around a small remotely operated vehicle (ROV) named NEREID. Its purpose is to make it possible to see how a particular stretch of ocean changes over time. Once complete, NEREID will record a “fingerprint” of the water at a chosen location; when it is returned to that location later, it will report what has changed — in salinity, pH, temperature, and other physical and chemical properties.
NEREID is currently in development. The first prototype, NEREID Alpha, is a temperature-testing ROV now under construction, and all testing is carried out aboard a sailboat — a kind of vessel with a long and distinguished record in ocean science.
The project is run the way sound science is run: a baseline comes before any claim, what has been built is kept clearly apart from what is only planned, and each step is recorded in an open build log. A method like that can be checked by anyone, whatever the age of the person who follows it.
NEREID Alpha is tested aboard a sailboat. That is a practical choice, but it is also a scientific one: the study of the oceans began under sail, and wind remains one of the lightest-footprint ways to reach the sea.
Here are some of the reasons sailing vessels matter to ocean science — including several that surprise most people.
The aim is not to claim that sailing is perfect — only that, done well, it is among the lightest ways to put instruments into the sea.
Organizations are cordially invited to fund and build NEREID in collaboration with the project’s founder and director. Parties interested in supporting the project, whether through funding or joint development, are welcome to make contact.
07 · NEREID
To know how the ocean is changing, you first need to know what it was. NEREID is designed around that single idea: record a place, return, and compare.
NEREID is dropped into a chosen part of the ocean.
It measures the water — temperature, salinity, pH and more — and stores the result as that place’s fingerprint.
Later, NEREID is brought back to the same place.
It measures again and shows the differences from the stored fingerprint.
Planned system — the fingerprint memory has not been built yet. NEREID Alpha, the temperature-testing prototype, is the first step.
| Property | Stored fingerprint | Return visit | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Temperature | — | — | — |
| Salinity | — | — | — |
| pH | — | — | — |
| Other measurements | — | — | — |
This shows the layout NEREID’s report is planned to have. NEREID has not yet taken measurements, so no values are shown.
In Greek mythology the Nereids were the fifty sea-nymphs, daughters of the sea-god Nereus, who were said to help sailors in trouble at sea. The name has other lives too: Nereid is one of Neptune’s moons, discovered in 1949, with one of the most stretched-out orbits of any moon in the solar system; and Nereis is a genus of marine bristle worms, the ragworms, that burrow through coastal sediments around the world.
Organizations are invited to fund and build NEREID together with the project’s founder.
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