One Ocean Expedition 2025-2026 

A 12-month global voyage with the Norwegian tall ship Statsraad Lehmkuhl - a floating ambassador for the UN Ocean Decade. Combining sail training, ocean science, education and diplomacy to highlight the ocean’s vital role and inspire action for a sustainable ocean. Visiting 27 ports on three continents, including a historic transit of the Northwest Passage.

2025 - 2026

One Ocean Expedition 

Statsraad Lehmkuhl arrived in Nuuk July 28, and will stay until August 5. 

Next port is Pond Inlet, Greenland, the gateway to the Northwest passage, arriving August 13.

Over the course of a year, the expedition will visit 27 ports across three continents, including a historic transit through the Northwest Passage. Several legs are open to the public - no sailing experience needed! Welcome on board!

Sailing route

Docked in the port of Nuuk, Greenland

Follow our journey

On their way to Greenland, 36 students from 16 countries are learning about climate and the ocean aboard Statsraad Lehmkuhl. Their three-week voyage combines sailing, fieldwork, and lectures -and creates a rare space for cross-disciplinary science and cultural exchange.

A sailing course in climate and ocean science

It’s no wonder Emmanuel Boss is smiling, he is only working when the sun is shining. Yes, it’s absolutely true, and there’s a perfectly logical explanation for it.

The two other nets, and the Rosette - all used for sampling the ocean

Doing research only when the sun shines

On the way from the Azores to Greenland, Statsraad Lehmkuhl crosses the Gulf Stream. The current starts in the Gulf of Mexico and brings heath to northern Europe.

Sailing into Europe’s central heating system

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Following the success of the One Ocean Expedition 2021–2023, Statsraad Lehmkuhl is once again on an international voyage to promote ocean sustainability. Over the course of 12 months, the expedition will visit 27 ports across three continents, including a historic transit of the Northwest Passage. 

On The One Ocean Expedition, Statsraad Lehmkuhl is filled with students, researchers and voyage crew who all work together to sail the big ship and gather experience and knowledge about the ocean.

Life on board

Tromsø, Norway

Bergen, Norway - Lerwick, UK

Reykjavik, Iceland

Nice, France 

Ponta Delgada, the Azores (Portugal)

Nuuk, Greenland

Pond Inlet, Greenland  

Gjoa Haven, Canada

Cambridge Bay, Canada 

Whittier, Alaska USA 

Vancouver, Canada

Seattle, USA

San Fransisco, USA

San Diego, USA

La Paz, Mexico

Herradura, Costa Rica

Cartagena, Columbia

Herradura, Costa Rica - Panama Canal

Norfolk, USA

Cádiz, Spain

Brest, France 

Dublin, Ireland

Bergen, Norway

The voyage from the Azores to Greenland is an intense community, where students both sail the ship, take part in teaching, and conduct fieldwork. 

Endre Tvinnereim, professor of political science at the University of Bergen, is one of the initiators of the course.

Tvinnereim has organized a course at sea before, but that voyages lasted one and a half week rather than three.

– Now we haven’t seen land for a very long time, but that also means we can really work in a concentrated way over longer periods and get more done.

Teaching on board Statsraad Lehmkuhl offers opportunities that do not exist on land:

– It is very good that we can spend so much time together. People get to know each other better and can do group work and also hold small lectures for each other. We teachers also have the opportunity to first lecture on a topic, and then give students the chance to provide feedback, so that we can prepare a new lecture on what they want to know more about.

The course is interdisciplinary, combining natural and social science perspectives on the ocean and climate change. The students learn about both natural and human-driven processes, and about humanity’s role in nature. Here, natural scientists, social scientists, philosophers, legal scholars, and historians collaborate. Normally, science students are in the majority on courses like this - but not this time. According to Tvinnereim, this balance offers a rare chance for genuine cross-disciplinary learning.

– It is quite new and good. Not only for the natural scientists to learn something about the humanities, but actually useful for those in the humanities to actually help take samples, use the instruments, haul on ropes, and look at the temperature and salinity profile down into the depths. To see how the work is done in practice.

The students live closely together in the banjer, sleep in hammocks, and share both watch duties and meals. This closeness affects both learning and the social life on board.

– I think it works very well. They are highly motivated and work well together. They communicate well across groups, and I am very happy about that. You are very close to your neighbor, so you have to relate to each other in a good and constructive way.

Tvinnereim notes that living so close to the students is enjoyable for him as a teacher as well:

– Standing buoy watch together all the way aft is a very good opportunity to have good conversations about academic topics – and completely different things.

Tvinnereim hopes the students will not only gain subject knowledge.

– To achieve interdisciplinarity, you really have to spend time together across fields and get to know each other, and you have to see how people do things in practice, not just read what is written in articles. And I also hope they have built good networks that they can use in the future, when they might become established researchers.

He also values the cooperation with the ship’s crew:

– It is very nice to see how maritime culture is passed on and communicated to people who will work with climate and ocean science for the next 30–40 years. That they learn the names of the sails, sing shanties, and learn about sailor-superstitions and tattoos. Everything that happens on a ship - which has thousand-year-old traditions. The university is a place for preserving knowledge, and Statsraad Lehmkuhl is an important bearer of culture, so the fact that we can work together in this field is, I think, very valuable.

That the course gathers students from three continents and 16 countries makes the voyage toward Greenland special – especially in a time of major geopolitical tensions and focus on the Arctic.

– The fact that we can meet across national borders and be together for quite a long time is very, very important and very valuable. Perhaps more valuable than we realized when we started planning this course, says Tvinnereim.

– It’s a sunny day algorithm because of the satellites, says Emmanuel Boss, Professor at the School of Marine Sciences at the University of Maine, USA.

He is working on one of the most challenging and promising frontiers of oceanography, connecting satellite observations of the ocean’s color with real, biological samples from the sea surface.

– We want to use this data to develop algorithms to observe biodiversity from space. And the only way you can do it is when the satellite sees the ocean.

Instruments such as OLCI on board ESA’s Sentinel-3 satellite, NASA's MODIS on board Aqua, VIIRS on board JPSS, and the PACE satellite, all monitor the ocean’s colour, an indicator of what is happening in the uppermost layers of the sea. But these observations need to be interpreted to reveal the whole story.

Emmanuel works together with Lucie Cassarino, Science coordinator for the One Ocean Expedition to take samples of the ocean, at the same time that the satellites high above Statsraad Lehmkuhl take their pictures. Lucie launches what she call "the High speed net". It looks similar to 

The Bongo net is used when the ship is lying still, the High speed net is dragged along with the ship, 

– The net is specially designed to capture microorganisms as the ship moves, Lucie explains. First we collect a sample with the net, and then we filter it. We do this to collect eDNA, that is environmental DNA.

Environmental DNA sampling is a technique that tells the scientists which organisms that are present in the sea by analyzing the traces of genetic material they leave behind in the water. This means they can discover a wide range of marine life, even those that are too small to see or that might escape traditional nets.

– We use the microscope to take pictures of the organism we can see in the sample, Lucie says. Then we compare these different measurements to make sure that we do not make mistakes, that we identify the correct species.

The combination of eDNA and microscopy offers a powerful way to verify what's truly in the water, from phytoplankton and zooplankton to countless unknown microorganisms.

– We hope to find everything that you have in the ocean. Even very, very, very small microorganisms, says Lucie.

The scientists look up what they have found in a library of known DNA samples.

– Go and find all the match-ups in that library and say, oh, this was there, this was there, this was there, this was there, and so on, says Emmanuel.

But the library is not complete. This is why sequencing of the collected DNA is so important.

– We get sequences of all the organisms that are in the sample, but you see, most of them we don't know, says Emmanuel.

So - despite the enormous potential of satellite and eDNA synergy, the field still faces major limitations.

– It is a problem that we're still very data poor in many ways, Emmanuel emphasizes. And until we get a much more comprehensive view of the ocean, it's really, really hard to interpret the observations we have.

This is how science works, adding small pieces of information, one after another - making the overall view better and better. In this case, make it possible to calibrate and improve satellite data so that it can reflect what is really happening in the ocean, without needing to physically be there.

– The data we are collecting here are going to be put in the database of the satellite. So it can recognize what's in the ocean right from the atmosphere, says Lucie.

The Gulf Stream carries more water than all the world’s rivers combined, flowing northeast towards Europe. Without this stream Scandinavia would have the same cold climate as Greenland, Alaska, and northern Canada. 

The last few yeas there are indications that the Gulf Stream is weakining. Could it come to a halt? No…, and perhaps.

What drives the water out of the Gulf of Mexico and into the Atlantic is wind. 

, which blow from east to west near the equator, and the westerlies, which blow from west to east between 30 and 60 degrees north, sustain a large gyre in the North Atlantic.

The water flows north along the western side and south along the eastern side of the ocean. Because the planet rotates, currents along the western edge of an ocean basin become stronger than those on the eastern edge. The Gulf Stream is therefore a powerful current: 100 km wide, 800–1,200 meters deep, and moving at about 2.5 m/s at the surface.

As long as the sun shines and the Earth keeps rotating, this vast gyre will keep spinning in the Atlantic. No risk of it stopping, that is.

But it is not this gyre that carries warm water to Northern Europe and Scandinavia. Off Newfoundland, a system scientists call the "Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation", abbreviated AMOC, takes over.

The engine behind AMOC is differences in temperature and salinity. Cold, salty water is heavier than warmer, less salty water. The cold in the north cools the ocean surface and increases its salinity, causing the water to sink. This engine works like a pump - the sinking water is the piston that pulls warm water northward along the surface and pushes cold water southward at depth.

Wind and tides create currents at the surface, but all the deep ocean currents are formed this way, driven by differences in salinity and temperature.

In addition to influencing the climate, this mechanism does two other important jobs:

The sinking water carries CO2 from the atmosphere. Over the last 100 years, the ocean has absorbed a quarter of all the CO2 humans have emitted. Surface water absorbs CO2 everywhere, but there are only two places where this CO2-rich water sinks to the depths: around Antarctica and in the North Atlantic. 

When deep water eventually rises again, it brings with it a wealth of nutrients that, without these currents, would remain locked in the seafloor.

Now that the planet is warming, scientists have begun to wonder whether the “pump” in the Norwegian Sea and the North Atlantic might stop. The northern regions are warming the fastest, so the water is no longer cooled as much as before, while ice from Greenland and floating in the Arctic Ocean is melting, making the water less salty.

Marius Årthun is a researcher at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Bergen and at the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research. He studies AMOC. 

 shows that the formation of deep water, the “pump” in AMOC, is moving northwards into the Arctic Ocean as the sea ice disappears.

– Theories about such a shift have existed, says Marius Årthun in an article published by the Bjerknes Centre. But it was expected to happen only in a much warmer future. That it has already been underway for several decades, we did not know.

Årthun does not believe there will be a sudden stop to the current in the next decades, as some have feared, but he warns against becoming complacent.

– Atlantic water is pushing into the Arctic, but it cannot do so forever. How long can the Arctic keep the wheel turning? Will we reach a point where even that gear is worn out?