Seventy percent of our planet is one connected ocean. It produces half the oxygen we breathe and feeds over three billion people.

Today the ocean is at risk, losing biodiversity at an alarming rate due to pollution, overfishing, and climate change. The ocean’s temperatures greatly influence our planet’s climate, weather, fish stocks, and bird populations. Ocean temperatures are steadily increasing yet our understanding of how they vary at the scale of the ecosystems is largely unknown to science.

Only the power of citizen science and crowdsourcing can “plug this hole” in our understanding of how temperature varies in the ocean. Without this knowledge, the management and conservation of marine ecosystems is a “shot in the dark”. It is a vital source of information that governments, scientists, fisheries, and conservation organizations need if they are going to understand this major threat to ocean life.

Project Hermes is the first global effort to measure ocean temperatures worldwide at the scale of the ecosystem. Cousteau Divers is a non-profit worldwide community of divers and dive centers united to study and protect marine life. The Global Change Institute of the University of Queensland is a world-class research organization dedicated to solving the mysteries of the ocean. NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch uses some of the most advanced technology in the world to monitor the sea surface temperatures from satellites. DAN Europe’s Diving Safety Laboratory is the leading diver safety research organization in Europe and has been collecting diving temperatures for a decade. This data will be anonymously fed into the Hermes software to obtain a 10-year backlog of sea temperatures. Together we will organize a hackathon in October to explore programming solutions and the practical applications of this new data. We’re trying to reveal ocean temperatures in time for the United Nations COP21 Climate Summit in Paris this December.

We really need your help to make Project Hermes a reality! You can do the following:

• Donate to this pre-campaign before September 2 here.

• Join our thunderclap, a tool to synchronize social media sharing, maximizing impact, here.

Join us!

Thank you for actively supporting Project Hermes to take the temperature of the ocean. Literally. Many thanks from our partners as well, including the beautiful and fragile beings in the ocean who sustain our very lives. Our fates are connected!

“In full truth, we are partners to the fish, the snail, the crab, the grasses that grow in secret places beyond our sight. Upon their survival, hangs our own.” – Jacques-Yves Cousteau