- Our flagship, RV Polaris II, is a 21m wooden-hulled vessel that was acquired by the University of Otago in 2006 to replace the aging RV Munida.
- Dry and wet labs, and computing facilities on board the Polaris enable research while at sea.
- Accurate positioning and navigation are facilitated by GPS and Racal Microfix.
- Facilities for dredging, trawling, grab sampling and shallow coring (including a piston corer), contribute to the department's sedimentological and paleontological research and teaching.
- Marine geophysical equipment – used to image the seafloor and shallow sub-bottom – includes a Teledyne-Benthos towfish that contains interferometric side scanning sonar (C3D) and CHIRP, a Ferranti 5210A high-resolution/sub-bottom profiler with a Boomer source, and Klein 595 digital side scan sonar.
- A CTD (conductivity, temperature, density) tool and accompanying water column sampling rosette contributes to marine geochemistry and physical oceanography studies to depths of 500m.
- Otago Repository for Core Analysis with GeoTek MSCL and Itrax XRF .