On May 15 2021, the R/V "KEXUE" successfully completed NSFC (National Nature Science Foundation of China) Western Pacific Ocean Open-sharing Cruise 2020, and returned back to her home port in Qingdao.

Fan WANG, director of the Institute of Oceanology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the vice chair of NPOCE Scientific Steering Committee, greeted her at the dock, cordially expressed his condolences to the members of the scientific expedition ship and congratulated the voyage on the complete success.

This voyage starting from March 15 in Qingdao, soldiered through a non-stop 62 days and 11181 sea miles, which is the longest scientific expedition in the "science" history. It carried a total of 76 team members from 9 institutions including the Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ocean University of China, East China Normal University, Xiamen University, Hohai University, Tianjin University of Science and Technology, Nanhai Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Acoustics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The projects of NSFC carried on board were more than 20 that cover multiple disciplines such as oceanography, marine ecology, marine biology and marine geology.

The surveyed sea area includes the western Pacific warm pool area, the warm pool cold tongue junction area and the key deep water channel, completed more than 200 operations at more than 50 stations, including multi-parameter temperature-salt-depth profiles and water extraction operations, and deep seas. Networking operations, vertical trawl operations, box-type mud mining operations, vertical microstructure profiler operations, full-depth trace water extraction operations, underwater particulate matter and zooplankton image collection, etc. The voyage also carried out navigational water collection and navigational acoustic Doppler flow velocity profile measurement.