The 45-year-old FSO Safer, long used as a floating oil storage platform with 1.1 million barrels of crude on board, has been moored off the rebel-held Yemeni port of Hodeida since 2015, without being serviced.
One research mission, dubbed Expedition 386, wants to use sediment records in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Japan to track and record thousands of years of past seismic activity.
The researchers have discovered that nearly 10% of the oil floating on the Gulf after the Deepwater Horizon disaster was dissolved into seawater by sunlight.
