The Tara Pacific expedition (2016–2018) has applied a pan-ecosystemic approach on coral reefs throughout the Pacific Ocean, drawing an east–west transect from Panama to Papua New Guinea and a south–north transect from Australia to Japan, sampling corals around 32 island systems with a coherent and consistent set of protocols. This ambitious project aims at revealing a massive amount of novel biodiversity, shedding light on the complex links between genomes, transcriptomes, metabolomes, organisms, and ecosystem functions in modern coral reef systems.