The oceans are in deep trouble. The Trump administration is ditching a vital deep-sea monitoring system
By Laura Paddison, Ella Nilsen, CNN
(CNN) — The Trump administration has announced it will dismantle a $368 million deep-ocean monitoring system that provides critical data on the world’s oceans. The decision is sparking alarm among experts that US is taking eyes off the oceans at a dangerous time of record-breaking sea temperatures, an imminent super El Niño and fears a critical system of ocean currents could collapse, ushering in global chaos.
The Ocean Observatories Initiative, or OOI, was set up in 2016 and is made up of around 900 instruments in parts of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans specially designed to withstand the immense pressure and corrosive saltiness of the ocean depths. Moored equipment and underwater gliders continuously collect real-time data allowing scientists to monitor the heath of the ocean, including shifts in ocean chemistry and changes to the powerful currents that shape global weather and climate.
The initiative was supposed to operate for three decades, but on May 21, the National Science Foundation, which funds the system, announced it would be “descoping” the network. Over the next 15 months, “in-water infrastructure” will be removed from arrays off the coasts of Alaska, Washington, Oregon and North Carolina and from the North Atlantic off southeast Greenland, the NSF said in a statement.
The decision “aligns with NSF’s wider strategy of a nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio,” Mike England, head of media affairs at NSF, told CNN.
The announcement comes as the Trump administration undoes climate protections and attempts to dismantle and defund climate science, at the same time as it pushes to start mining the deep sea for critical minerals. Scientists have expressed deep concerns that dismantling this ocean monitoring system undermines ocean science at a critical time, reduces US scientific leadership and is abandoning taxpayer-funded equipment already paid for and installed.
“I’d call this penny wise, tons foolish,” said Rick Spinrad, an oceanographer who led the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during the Biden administration. “OOI is proving its value for a range of economic and social benefits: from fisheries management to weather forecasting, to protection from coastal flooding … Where’s the analysis of return on investment that shows that eliminating OOI is in the taxpayers’ best interest?”
The global oceans are enduring a period of huge change — some of which remains largely unexplained. Ocean temperatures have been off the charts in some places, fueling more intense hurricanes, driving sea level rise and causing mass coral bleaching.
Sustained ocean monitoring is “how we detect emerging risks in real time,” said Helen Findlay, a biological oceanographer at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK. “Without them, we are effectively choosing to navigate an increasingly volatile ocean with diminishing visibility.”
Impacts coast-to-coast
A huge area of concern is what the loss of monitoring will mean for our understanding of a crucial network of Atlantic Ocean currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. Scientists have used data from the OOI to help try to map the AMOC’s fate.
A growing body of research suggest the AMOC could be on course to collapse, potentially as early as this century, which would bring catastrophic consequences, including accelerated sea level rise along the US East Coast, a winter deep freeze in Europe and prolonged droughts across a swath of Africa.
“Ongoing monitoring of the ocean is critical, especially now,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a physics and oceans professor at Potsdam University in Germany who studies the AMOC. “Concern in the oceanography community about major ocean current changes ahead is large.”
At another array set to be dismantled, the Ocean Station Papa in the Gulf of Alaska, autonomous buoys and gliders track aspects of ocean health, including acidity in an area that’s vital for the fishing industry but highly vulnerable to ocean acidification.
Findlay, who studies ocean acidification, said her research has shown large parts of the global ocean “have already crossed into a ‘zone of risk’ for ecosystem change” and the ocean “is on a dangerous tipping course.” None of this work would have been possible without long-term observations, she added.
Meanwhile, in the Pacific Northwest, the dismantling of ocean arrays will have more-immediate impacts to commercial fishing and maritime industries. That’s because the Coastal Endurance Array off the coasts of Washington and Oregon are integrated into other ocean instrumentation in the area, helping to monitor temperature and water oxygen levels.
The Endurance array helps tribal fisherman from the Quinault Indian Nation figure out if there are enough Dungeness crab to catch off the coast, or if the oxygen levels are low enough to cause the crabs to die off or move to other waters, said Jan Newton, an oceanography professor at the University of Washington, who helps maintain the array.
The array’s buoys also help maintain critical weather readings for boats in the area, alerting captains when dangerous weather is imminent. The Endurance’s 11 instruments will be taken out of the ocean by the end of the month, after which the area will have insufficient data, Newton said.
“To me, this is counterintuitive because we are not funding the things that will help us maintain maritime dominance and shellfish competitiveness,” Newton said.
Some have accused the Trump administration of ditching ocean monitoring to please fossil fuel companies. “Fossil fuel is heating our oceans by the zettajoule, so Trump’s corrupt fossil fuel stooges want to turn off the monitors,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, posted on X, Tuesday.
CNN reached out to the White House for comment, but had not heard back at the time of publication.
The NSF’s England said the Ocean Observatories Initiative was not cancelled but did not provide more information on exactly what is being kept.
Experts say the ripple effects of what is being lost will be wide. It will “create an irreparable blind spot for our country in predicting earthquakes, fishery health, storm forecasting, coastal flooding and more,” said Chris Robbins, associate director of scientific initiatives at Ocean Conservancy. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
CNN’s Andrew Freedman contributed to this report
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