For what was formally referred to as a kick-off meeting, forty-one scientists from sixteen different nations convened in New Orleans in December 2010. Some of Katrina’s effects were still being felt in the city. One of the Gulf of Mexico’s most intricate marine habitats provided some of the seafood served at the nearby restaurant tables. The group that would eventually become the INDEEP Project decided in a conference room somewhere in that city that the planet’s deepest, least understood region—which makes up the largest biome on Earth and covers more than half of its surface—deserved a concerted, international scientific effort to comprehend it before it vanished.

Those who attended that founding meeting often recall a certain aspect of it. The scope of the ambition wasn’t the only factor. It was the realization that the deep sea had been studied by solitary researchers who worked in different nations, published in different journals, and hardly ever communicated across the institutional boundaries that divide oceanography, marine biology, policy, and law. The International Network for Scientific Investigation of Deep-Sea Ecosystems, or INDEEP, was established to at least partially dismantle those barriers and establish a framework for the collection, synthesis, and practical application of the dispersed knowledge of the deep ocean.

Under the direction of Dr. Maria Baker, the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton oversaw the project from 2011 to 2017. It carried on the intellectual momentum of the Census of Marine Life, a remarkable ten-year global effort to document what lives in the ocean that ended in 2010 with more new species descriptions and cooperative research partnerships than any comparable project in the history of marine science. The Total Foundation provided funding for its first six years. In a way, INDEEP was the result of those Census partnerships refusing to just cease.

Four working groups—Taxonomy and Evolution, Biodiversity and Biogeography, Population Connectivity, and Ecosystem Function—organized the network’s activities. Each group focused on a facet of deep-sea life that had previously been investigated separately. The project documents made it clear that the objective was to advance and synthesize knowledge of deep-sea global biodiversity and then construct a link between that science and the society that needed to take action. The bridge, the final component, is what set INDEEP apart. Papers are produced by the majority of scientific networks. Additionally, INDEEP created institutional architecture, management recommendations, and policy frameworks for the governance decisions that were beginning to become critically important.

Because the deep ocean was more than just a subject of scientific interest by 2011. It was a frontier of industry. Claims were being filed by deep-sea mining firms. A generation ago, it would have been technically impossible for fishing fleets to reach such depths. Operations for offshore oil and gas were expanding into new areas. The science was compartmentalized, and exploitation was happening quickly. The creation of the Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative, or DOSI, a multi-stakeholder organization that currently coordinates science, law, economics, and policy around deep-ocean governance across more than 115 countries, may have been INDEEP’s most enduring contribution. Given what DOSI has grown into, it’s difficult to avoid the impression that INDEEP was more of a foundation that was purposefully laid knowing what would need to be built on top of it than a research project.

In 2017, the project was officially finished. The website has been archived. The working groups are no longer together. However, the scientists who went through it are now dispersed throughout research centers and universities on every continent, bringing the deep-sea biodiversity framework that INDEEP developed into both their individual work and the policy processes that depend on it more and more. The majority of the ocean floor they were attempting to comprehend is still unmapped. The dangers they were monitoring have become more serious. By any honest accounting, the work is far from complete.