Bishop Museum · Hawaiʻi Undersea Research Laboratory
PISCES V
A research catalogue of the deep — every dive of a two-kilometre submersible, mapped and read by depth.
Enter the atlas ↓DSV Pisces V · photo NOAA / NURP, public domain
A research catalogue of the deep — every dive of a two-kilometre submersible, mapped and read by depth.
Enter the atlas ↓Built in 1973 and rated to two kilometres, Pisces V carried scientists past the reach of SCUBA to the walls, seamounts, and wrecks of the Pacific — and now rests, like this record, on the Bishop Museum campus. Sixteen dives are told in full; four hundred more are charted from the archive.
— entries · shallow → deep
A three-person pressure sphere rated to two kilometres, Pisces V gives scientists direct-observation access to depths far beyond SCUBA — through viewports, video, a manipulator arm, and sampling baskets. Position on the bottom is held to within five to ten metres by combined ultra-short- and long-baseline acoustic tracking, which is why the dives in this catalogue can be plotted at all. The physical submersible now resides on the Bishop Museum campus.
| Specification | Value |
|---|---|
| Test depth | 2,000 m · 6,560 ft |
| Life support | 140 hours |
| Bottom time / dive | 7–10 hours |
| Cruising speed | 2.0 knots |
| Position fix | 5–10 m · USBL/LBL |
| Occupants | 3 pilot + 2 obs. |
For half a century, the Pisces submersibles carried Bishop Museum science into the deep. The collaboration between HURL and the Museum reaches back to the 1970s and has yielded more than a thousand specimens — across marine invertebrates, ichthyology, malacology, and algae — many of them species new to science.
Beyond specimens, the Museum draws on the extensive photo and video library HURL amassed with these vehicles — arguably the world's most complete documentation of deep-sea biodiversity around Hawaiʻi and the Pacific. Museum researchers piloted the subs on many occasions, including a $1.5 million project to document Hawaiʻi's deep coral reefs and the pioneering work of coordinating submersible dives with deep rebreather divers.
That relationship has surfaced in exhibit after exhibit — Nature's Wonders (2014), Journeys (2016), Spineless Wonders (2019), and Taxonomy (2023) — and in permanent displays inside the Science Adventure Center. Retired from service in 2018, Pisces IV and Pisces V are now proposed to come home to the Bishop Museum campus, where they would stand as icons of Hawaiʻi's undersea exploration.
The active undersea volcano off the southeast coast of Hawaiʻi Island — destined to become the archipelago's next island — was named Lōʻihi when Western science "discovered" it in the 1940s. But cultural practitioners at Bishop Museum recognized the name Kamaʻehu a Kanaloa in mele recorded in Hawaiian-language newspapers of the 1800s and early 1900s, connecting the seamount to Pele's birth from the ocean — and the name was changed to honor that lineage. Pisces first descended to Kamaʻehuakanaloa in 1987; in 2011 Tom Pohaku Stone rode Pisces IV down its South Rift and shared the seamount's significance for the National Geographic film The Alien Deep. The atlas records these dives as science and as return.
HURL logged on the order of nine hundred Pisces V dives. Sixteen are catalogued here — the ones the published record lets us place and describe. The remainder sit in the public HURL archive as tracklines, animal identifications, and oceanographic profiles, waiting to be transcribed. Every entry names its source and how sure we are of it; a fact divorced from its documentation history loses its meaning.
P5-###) you intend to work on.pisces_v_dives.geojsonWith a source and confidence. Survey-grade coordinates flip the mark from sited to documented.