By Julia Conley, Common Dreams
In what a number of scientists suggested was the Trump administration’s latest effort to stop tracking the changing climate in hopes of convincing the public that the climate emergency isn’t happening, the National Science Foundation announced Monday that it was dismantling a crucial deep-ocean monitoring system that for years has helped researchers understand the impacts of the crisis on the world’s oceans.
The NSF said it plans to send ships this month to remove more than 900 instruments, part of a project called the Ocean Observatories Initiative. The project collects data on temperatures, currents and the ocean’s absorption of carbon dioxide off the coasts of Oregon, Alaska, Washington and North Carolina, as well as in the Irminger Sea between Iceland and Greenland.
A spokesperson for NSF told The New York Times that the dismantling of the initiative will help the NSF in “prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies as well as a deliberate approach to smart life cycle management within its portfolio of research infrastructure.”
The reasoning given for the shuttering of the project, said Tara Blume, a journalist at Oklahoma City NBC affiliate KFOR, was “a master class in obfuscation and doublespeak.”
Genevieve Guenther of the group End Climate Silence shared her own interpretation of why the $368 million ocean observation system is being discontinued, despite the fact that it had been set to collect data for 25 years.
“We need to track ocean currents to assess how close we are to climate tipping points that will essentially destroy the world as we know it,” said Guenther. “The GOP doesn’t want us to be able to do that. That’s why they’re dismantling ocean monitoring.”
Scientists have used data gathered by moorings, robotic vehicles and other instruments that transmit the information to research laboratories, to study changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC), a current system that moves warm water northward and cools the Arctic and Northern Atlantic regions while absorbing carbon dioxide deep into the ocean and keeping it out of the atmosphere.
Data gathered at the observation station in the Irminger Sea has been key to understanding AMOC, which scientists fear is gradually weakening due to planetary heating and could ultimately collapse, likely causing major global weather changes.
“This is absolutely crazy,” said David Doniger, a senior strategist and attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate and energy department. “Wouldn’t you want to know if the ocean currents are changing? Wouldn’t you want to know ocean temperatures? These things affect everything from fishing to hurricanes.”
Following the announcement that the stations will be dismantled in the coming weeks, said Blume, “science gasps for breath.”
President Donald Trump has attempted several times to shut down or drastically reduce the budget of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, which costs $48 million annually to run. Congress has restored the program’s funding.
The dismantling of the program comes months after the Environmental Protection Agency repealed the “endangerment finding,” which for years had underpinned the department’s environmental regulations; after the administration closed down the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which had gathered data on hurricanes and extreme weather to help improve forecasts; and after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration released a statement on record-breaking temperatures in 2024 and 2025 — without any mention of the climate crisis or climate change.
“Blinding the public to climate change won’t make it go away. It will only accelerate its profound consequences,” said clinical researcher Iris Gorfinkel.
According to the Trump administration, said historian Nick Kapur, “apparently climate change doesn’t exist if you prevent scientists from measuring it.”
Julia Conley is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams. This piece was originally published at https://www.commondreams.org/news/subsurface-ocean-monitoring. Banner photo: Researchers prepare to deploy a glider instrument into the ocean. (Photo by Rebecca Travis/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution).
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