The Trump administration has directed the National Science Foundation to begin dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a $368 million network of more than 900 instruments that has provided a continuous decade-long record of ocean temperature, currents, marine biodiversity, and climate data. The NSF issued a notice on May 21 announcing that it had “initiated descoping” of the program — days after President Trump removed all members of the independent National Science Board that oversees the agency. The plan calls for recovering all in-water infrastructure from observation sites off the coasts of North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska, as well as from the Irminger Sea between Greenland and Iceland, over the next 15 months.
The OOI first became operational in June 2016 and has since functioned as what its operators describe as “the world’s most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems.” The network has supported research on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a critical system of ocean currents that studies suggest may be more vulnerable to collapse than previously thought, as well as on carbon sequestration, marine ecosystem health, and fisheries management. Data from the array has helped scientists track how winter storms and cooling surface waters drive deep-ocean mixing in the Irminger Sea — processes central to understanding how the global climate system functions.
Jim Edson, the OOI’s principal investigator, said the NSF’s plan involves a phased recovery and infrastructure removal process. “As infrastructure is recovered from each array, the associated real-time data streams and observing capabilities at those locations will come to an end,” Edson said in a statement. He described the network as having “delivered the world’s most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems” and expressed gratitude to the scientists and engineers who built and maintained it.
Hilary Palevsky, a professor of marine biogeochemistry and oceanography at Boston College, said the loss of the OOI’s data stream would be especially painful because the engineering team behind the array had spent more than a decade refining the instruments’ performance. “One of the real powers of this OOI and a lot of the collection of autonomous data is that scientists like me don’t have to have the expertise or the resources to be able to deploy this kind of infrastructure ourselves,” Palevsky said. “Over the more than 10 years that these things have been deployed, they’ve just gotten better and better at it. And so the data return has also gotten better and better over time.” She added that the scientific community “was really just getting to the point of being able to capitalize on the data that had been collected so far.”
Palevsky warned that rebuilding such a network would be difficult because the dismantling process would also dissolve the specialized team required to operate it. “If we want to put the instruments back out again, we need people who know how to do it and the team that knows how to do it is being dismantled along with the infrastructure program itself,” she said. “We’re potentially at risk of having a gap in our ability to regain the expertise to do things that we had sort of just figured out how to pull off.”
Democratic lawmakers said they would fight the plan. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island posted on X that “fossil fuel is heating our oceans by the zettajoule, so Trump’s corrupt fossil fuel stooges want to turn off the monitors.” Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland called the move a “shortsighted move” that would “end up costing American taxpayers more not less,” according to the New York Times.
In a statement, NSF head of media affairs Mike England said the program was not being canceled entirely. “The decision to descope 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,” England said.
The dismantling of the OOI is the latest in a series of Trump administration actions that have rolled back federal climate and ocean science initiatives. MSI previously reported on the administration’s push to expand deep-sea mining and its decision to pay offshore wind operators to exit their federal leases. Palevsky said the consequences extend beyond ocean researchers. “As we reduce the amount of data that we have, the observations, as well as the science more generally to understand what’s happening in the climate system, it makes it much harder for us as a society to understand what we’re facing and what we need to do to plan for and adapt to it,” she said.