Since its founding under Payne, and later under the stewardship of CEO Iain Kerr, Ocean Alliance has been an important group in the worldwide effort to research and protect whales.

In its executive summary, Roger Payne stated that, "The Voyage of the Odyssey has proven irrefutably that ocean life is becoming polluted to unacceptable levels by metals and human-made contaminants."

In response, Ocean Alliance spent five years in the Gulf of Mexico, studying the impacts of the oil spill on marine life.

[11] • 1967: Ocean Alliance founder and president Roger Payne discovered, along with Scott McVay, that humpback whales sing songs.

[15][16] • 1970s: Ocean Alliance scientists pioneered many of the benign research techniques commonly used worldwide to study free-ranging whales.

• 1979, National Geographic magazine published an article by Payne which included a sound sheet of his ‘Songs of the Humpback Whale’.

[7] Their research vessel Odyssey has been featured on PBS, National Geographic, Discovery Channel, BBC, Canal Plus, NHK, Network Ten Australia, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Television New Zealand and many others.

[20] • 1970's–2000s: Ocean Alliance was involved in setting up and protecting marine parks in Hawaii, Alaska, Sri Lanka, the Galapagos Islands, Colombia, Costa Rica and Mexico.

In 2003, Ocean Alliance's work lead directly to a 1.2 million square mile marine mammal sanctuary being created in the waters of Papua New Guinea.

•2010–2014: Ocean Alliance spent five summers in the Gulf of Mexico in an attempt to determine the long-term toxicological impacts of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Over the decades a lack of maintenance, the toxic nature of the chemical compounds used to make the copper-based paint and the elements have all pulled the buildings into disrepair.

In 2008 Ocean Alliance purchased the buildings to be their new headquarters with the intention of making the Paint Factory a proud symbol of the city of Gloucester's pioneering spirit and of its intimate connection with the seas.

Ocean Alliance is developing the buildings, and among other things hope the buildings will house a state-of-the-art education center (complete with a library, a classroom and an interactive learning/media environment), a Paint Factory Museum and anti-fouling paint exhibit, offices, conference spaces, a robotics laboratory developing the research tools of tomorrow and a toxicology laboratory.

[30][31] In a 1979 National Geographic magazine article Ocean Alliance founder and president Roger Payne predicted that toxic pollution would replace the harpoon as the next greatest threat to whales.

As mammalian apex predators that nurse their young with milk, they are also relatively similar to us, and thus are seen as the ‘canaries in the golf mine’ regards humanities relationship with the oceans.

[20] On the program, Payne commented that, ‘Saving marine animals from the insidious effects of pesticides, fire retardants, plasticizers, and poisonous metals is not a selfless act.

[41] The unique long-term nature of this program has produced significant discoveries relating to the ecology, biological life cycle,[43] ethology and conservation of these species.

The techniques that Roger Payne, and later on Victoria Rowntree and Instituto Conservacion de Ballenas,[16] pioneered have since been well-established among cetacean science programs worldwide.

Although significant conservation threats still remain (primarily habitat loss), many populations have shown slow signs of recovery.

[48] After such incidents, people often look no further than the immediate impact: death tolls of particular species are logged, population declines/increases recorded, and these figures are seen as broadly representative of the environmental damage.

Preliminary analysis has shown potentially damaging levels of genotoxic metals including chromium and nickel in Sperm whales living in the area, significantly higher than the global average.

[54] To achieve the aim of conducting a long-term analysis, Ocean Alliance monitored the top apex predator of the region, the sperm whales.

For the final two years, they were joined by activist group the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, as part of a program labelled Operation Toxic Gulf.