National Geographic has set Friday, November 13, at 9 p.m. Eastern for Expedition: Saving Our Seas, a one-hour ocean special on its US cable channel, with Disney+ and Hulu streaming it from November 14. The 30-second trailer went up on National Geographic’s own channel on October 13 and had been watched about 95,000 times two days later. The voice carrying it is Auliʻi Cravalho, who was 14 and a high school freshman when Disney cast her as Moana.
The special is the television side of the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Ocean Expeditions, a research program running over several years that sends teams into every one of the five ocean basins. The National Geographic Society presents it with the Swiss watchmaker as partner, Offspring Films produced it, and Katharine Arthy directed.
Why Cravalho, and why now
Nature documentaries tend to hire narrators for authority, and the default has long been an older voice with decades of wildlife films behind it. Choosing a 25-year-old best known for an animated Pacific voyager is a different bet. It points the film at families and at the audience that grew up on Moana (2016) and its 2024 sequel, the same viewers Disney+ already serves.
The choice is not purely cosmetic. Cravalho was born in Kohala, Hawaii, and in 2021 said she had been accepted to Columbia University with plans to major in environmental science, according to her published career record. She has narrated nature material before, including the 2022 series Maui Shark Mystery, and appeared in the 2025 documentary Reef Builders. The publicity material for this special calls her an ocean conservationist.
Where the cameras went
For a 60-minute running time, the itinerary is crowded. Based on the program notes released by the producers, the special visits six teams:
- Southern Ocean: working from the Schmidt Ocean Institute ship Falkor (too), a group including oceanographer Andrew Thurber sent the robotic vehicle SuBastian close to 13,000 feet down. The producers list three firsts from the trip: the farthest-south deep-sea hydrothermal vent yet recorded, krill carrying eggs in swarms around 3,000 feet deep, and a giant Antarctic gonate squid seen alive.
- South Pacific: Kim Bernard and Leigh Torres follow blue whales and the krill they eat in New Zealand’s South Taranaki Bight with the local Māori community, while Anya Brown tests how much heat corals can take in the Cook Islands.
- Indian Ocean: Sheena Talma, the first deep-sea scientist from the Seychelles, trains her team on camera landers off South Africa before taking similar gear home.
- Atlantic: on the coast of The Gambia, where close to 500,000 people live in the path of rising water, Maiyai Taal Hocheimy and Angelo Bernardino survey the mangroves that shield the capital, Banjul.
- Arctic: chemist Kristina Brown, invited by the Inuit community of Gjoa Haven in Nunavut, Canada, makes what is billed as the first scientific study of the Sherman Basin, with elder Saul Aksalook Qirqniq.
- Everywhere at once: Katy Croff Bell of the Ocean Discovery League builds DORIS, a cheap, light imaging system meant to put deep-sea cameras in the hands of communities that have never had them.
Bell supplies the figure most likely to be repeated. In the producers’ notes she puts the share of the deep ocean humans have actually seen at roughly 0.001%, across a habitat that spans about two-thirds of the planet.
What the trailer gets right, and what it skips
Thirty seconds is very little room for six expeditions, and the trailer sensibly sells a mood rather than a syllabus: ice, deep water and Cravalho’s voice tying it together. It works as an announcement. It does not tell a casual viewer what any of these scientists found, which is the strongest card the film holds.
Some of that material is not new. The squid sighting dates from Christmas Day 2024, when the Falkor (too) crew filmed Gonatus antarcticus alive in the wild for the first time, and the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute publicized it in June 2025. Thurber, who was on board, described the animal as beautiful at the time. Viewers who followed that story will be seeing the full context nearly two years on, which is normal for documentary production but worth knowing before expecting fresh headlines.
The other question is sponsorship. A science film presented with a luxury brand as partner deserves the same scrutiny as any branded content, although the researchers named here hold university and institute posts and the finds above have been described outside the film’s own publicity. The fairest test will be whether the hour lets the Gambian, Seychellois and Inuit partners speak for themselves rather than serving as backdrop.
For readers outside the US: the 9 p.m. Eastern slot on November 13 equals 2 a.m. GMT on Saturday, November 14 in London, and the producers have not announced a UK broadcast date in the material we reviewed, although a separate UK promo has appeared on the National Geographic UK channel. In the US and on Disney+ and Hulu, the special arrives on November 14.
Further reading
- Wikipedia: Auliʻi Cravalho
- UCSB Marine Science Institute: This elusive Antarctic squid was seen for the first time
Image: Embajada de EEUU en Argentina, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
