On 14 June 2023, a boat carrying hundreds of migrants sank inside the Greek search and rescue zone in the Mediterranean Sea—the deadliest migrant shipwreck in recent history. Our digital reconstruction of the boat and mapping of its trajectory reveal inconsistencies in the Hellenic Coast Guard’s (HCG) account and indicate that over 600 people drowned as the result of a failed towing by the HCG.

Asylum seekers crossing the Aegean Sea are intercepted within Greek waters or arrested after they arrive on Greek shores, beaten, stripped of their possessions, and then forcefully loaded onto life rafts and left to drift back to the Turkish coast. FA/Forensis verified and mapped evidence for over 2000 such ‘drift-backs’, demonstrating the scale of this violent and illegal border defence practice.

The death of more than 40 people off the coast of Lesvos in October 2015 was the single deadliest incident in Europe's 'long summer of migration'. One of the survivors, Amel Alzakout, recorded the shipwreck on a waterproof wrist camera. Her footage provides a unique, situated perspective of this tragic event at the threshold of Europe.

Five months after Italy began to close its ports to migrants rescued at sea, a vessel carrying 93 people was spotted in the southern Mediterranean. The Italian and Libyan Coast Guards enlisted a private merchant ship to rescue the migrants and forcefully return them to Libya. Using tracking data and testimonies, Forensic Oceanography exposed a new mode of privatised border security.

When the Libyan coastguard interrupted a rescue operation by the NGO Sea Watch, at least twenty migrants lost their lives, and more were ‘pulled back’ to inhumane detention in Libya. Forensic Oceanography shone a light on the practices of a coastguard funded and trained by the Italian government.

The Iuventa has rescued over ten thousand people from the Mediterranean since it began operating in 2016. When the vessel was impounded by Italian authorities under suspicion of collusion with people smugglers, we used video evidence and meteorological data to refute the allegations.

Changing EU policies toward the rescue of migrants resulted in over a thousand deaths in the Mediterranean in the space of one week. Working with survivors and available shipping data, we recreated the incidents and explored the consequences of making rescue vessels out of commercial ships.

A migrants’ boat was left drifting for two weeks in NATO-monitored waters, its presence known to the Italian coastguard and other nearby vessels. Sixty-three people died. Using an array of sensing technologies—thermal cameras, radar, and tracking—Forensic Oceanography mapped the path of the boat.