For more than three decades, OGS Explora was one of the most recognisable ships of Italian marine research. Acquired by OGS from Prakla-Seismos in 1988, she worked across geophysics, geology, marine biology and oceanography, and became particularly associated with polar research. During her OGS years she completed eleven Antarctic campaigns and four Arctic campaigns.
At about 73 metres in length and with an ice-class hull, Explora was never an elegant yacht. She was a working ship: laboratories, winches, cables, instruments and containers arranged around the practical demands of going to sea and bringing measurements home. That functional character is precisely what made her such an appealing subject for a paper model.
The model shown here is built at 1:144 scale. Its long, low profile, superstructure and working deck make the construction immediately recognisable while still allowing the details of the real vessel to emerge from paper.
Technical data
- Scale: 1:144
- Paper: 160 gsm and 80 gsm
- Length: 51.5 cm
- Width: 8.5 cm
- Height: 15.4 cm
- Number of parts: 165
- Instructions: Visual and photographic, Italian / English
- Difficulty: 3/5
From the shipyard archive
Before becoming OGS Explora, the vessel belonged to the German geophysical company Prakla-Seismos. An original company brochure preserves photographs, drawings and technical information on Explora and her sister ship Prospekta. The document is a small piece of the ship’s pre-OGS history and can be opened by clicking here.
A second life
The story of Explora did not end when she left OGS.
In 2019, the arrival of the new research vessel Laura Bassi marked the beginning of the end of her long career in Italian public research. The following year she was chartered to the Genoa-based company MC International, and in 2021 OGS finally sold her. The familiar prefix disappeared from her name and OGS Explora became simply Explora again, as she had been before entering the Institute’s fleet.
For those of us who knew her as an oceanographic vessel, however, she will always remain the Explora.
For decades she had been a small moving piece of the scientific world: laboratories squeezed into a working ship, instruments lowered into deep water, long watches, rough seas, meals eaten between stations, days when almost nothing happened and others when everything seemed to happen at once. She carried generations of scientists and technicians across the Mediterranean, the Southern Ocean and many other seas, accumulating not only data but memories.
Her departure from OGS might easily have been the final chapter. It was not.
After a difficult period in Durban, South Africa, where she remained for months following technical problems, Explora returned to sea under private ownership. Her work changed: instead of oceanographic campaigns for a public research institute, she began operating mainly as a survey vessel, involved in seabed investigations and projects connected with submarine cables.
And she is still sailing.
During 2025 and 2026 her tracks appeared again and again along the Atlantic coast of Europe — Lisbon, La Pallice, Bilbao, Avilés, Galway. In September 2026 she was once more in Lisbon, still flying the Italian flag and, somewhat unexpectedly, still officially classified as a research vessel.
There is something strangely moving in this second life. Ships usually disappear from our lives abruptly: sold, renamed, dismantled, reduced to a few photographs and stories told by the people who sailed on them. Explora chose a different ending.
More than half a century after her launch, she is still out there.
Older, transformed, no longer ours — but still going to sea.
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