Earlier this week, a bipartisan group of United States senators delivered a letter to the National Science Foundation urging Acting Director Brian Stone to “reverse course” on a Trump administration plan to dismantle the “vital” Ocean Observatories Initiative. Comprised of “over 900 unique deep-sea buoys and other instruments,” the OOI “provides insights into changing ecosystem conditions and extreme weather events,” the group said. The administration’s plan threatens the “safety of our coastal communities” and undermines America’s “ability to monitor coastal environments, marine currents and extreme weather events.”
The National Science Foundation’s order to remove Initiative equipment from coastal waters off North Carolina, Washington and Alaska came “with no warning and no scientific review” last month, said The Associated Press. The program had been “slated to run another 15 to 20 years.” Pulling back now “reflects the further lack of understanding that the current administration has of scientific value and scientific merit,” said Craig McLean, who was the acting chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during the first Trump term, to The New York Times. Dismantling the OOI pushes the U.S. “back yet again into a rear seat in global scientific leadership.”
OOI data on “waves, currents, salinity, the soundscape for marine mammals, carbon dioxide levels, alkalinity and more” has been a “godsend to public researchers, hazard planners and private companies alike,” said The Bulwark. The loss, for example, “could well be existential” for North Carolina’s “tourism-dependent Outer Banks economy” and will be “pretty problematic for the rest of us, too.” The change is “pulling the plug on some of the most important science being done,” said retired coastal geologist and East Carolina University teacher Stanley R. Riggs to the outlet.
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The plan to shutter the OOI was originally “laid out by conservative strategist the Heritage Foundation,” said Oceanographic Magazine. The group’s Project 2025 authors “explicitly targeted the network” for its contributions to climate change research. Dismantling the ocean monitoring system “marks another step” in Trump’s “rollback of science and climate initiatives,” said The Guardian. It also comes amid Trump’s “push to expand deep-sea mining and loosen fishing regulations.”
“Preserving and improving OOI” and oceanographic science overall is “critical to advancing U.S. ocean science,” said the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine in a statement. Doing so takes on additional significance as “other countries, including our competitors” are “increasing their investments in ocean science and advancing their capacities.”
These cuts are “part of a broader retreat from environmental and climate-related science” by this White House, the AP said. Federal law requires congressional notification “at least 30 days in advance of any planned decommissioning of agency-owned facilities.” Instead, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Or.) “learned of the dismantling through news reports.”
“The alarm bells just went off,” said Merkley to the AP. “None of us” were given advance notice.
What next?
The National Science Foundation should respect “congressional intent and legal direction,” which is “clearly to maintain the operation of this cost-effective research system,” said the bipartisan Senate group in their letter to the NSF. Any subsequent efforts to alter oceanographic research should follow a “thorough evaluation of OOI — including engagement with the marine science community and other impacted stakeholders.” The NSF must “cease this expensive, destructive, and — crucially — illegal action at once,” a separate group of Democrats said in a letter signed by members of House Committees on both Science, Space, and Technology and Natural Resources.
For scientists who work with the OOI’s shared data, the program’s closure is only part of the frustration. “If we want to put [the instruments] back out again, we need people who know how to do it,” said Hilary Palevsky, a marine biogeochemistry and oceanography professor at Boston College, to The Guardian. However, the team with that exclusive expertise “is being dismantled along with the infrastructure program itself.”
Data collection for the OOI is a “huge engineering challenge,” said Palevsky in a separate interview with the Times. Researchers can’t simply leave “notes for the next person who comes in. There’s a lot of expertise that has the potential to be lost.”
