About Us

Our Vision: Be the foremost influencer on human interaction with the ocean.

Our History

Mapping, from the Latin ‘mappa mundi’, literally ‘sheet of the world’, began over 8,000 years ago. Today, surprisingly, we have still only mapped about 35% of our planet, leaving Earth mostly unknown and unexplored.

Terradepth’s founders, Joe Wolfel and Judson Kauffman, learned first hand just how dark and unknown the ocean is when they met in the Navy in 2004. Through their training and deployments, it became clear to them just how much ocean exploring is yet to be done. Together they endeavored to map the ocean floor and develop, for the first time in human history, a holistic understanding of the earth.

However, the real history of Terradepth is as old as human fascination with, and dependence on, the submerged parts of Earth.

It’s impossible to know when people started wondering what was underwater. We know that the Ancient Greeks dove for sponges and red coral commercially. Homeric poetry places sponge diving earlier than 850 BCE. Aristotle pioneered the idea for the first diving bell in the 4th century BCE. In 1535, we have the first reliably recorded dive in a bell: Guglielmo de Lorena’s exploration of Caligula's (a completely crazy Roman emperor) sunken barges in Italy.

The first verified manned submersible was invented in 1775 (dubbed “The Turtle”) by David Bushnell. Since then, huge advancements have been made in submersibles, culminating in the nuclear powered submarines in today’s navies.

Unmanned robotic exploration of the undersea environment is relatively recent —because robots are relatively recent. Discounting Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) in favor of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), the first AUV was invented at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab in 1957. Since then, hundreds of AUV designs have been conceptualized, manufactured, and operated for a variety of tasks that humans can’t, or won’t, do in the ocean.

Bottom line, humans have been innovating in the ocean for as long as we’ve been a species. Terradepth is simply at the tip of that particular spear. We come from a long line of explorers that dates back to the first person who took a deep breath and decided to be someone special.

Our Mission

Increase ocean knowledge through autonomous data collection on scale, at high resolution, and at a cost customers will pay for.