Why the National Science Foundation is ripping monitoring instruments out of the ocean

The US National Science Foundation is planning to remove hundreds of ocean monitoring instruments from four sites in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Scientists use data from the observational network to measure and track ocean climate variability, biogeochemical cycles, marine food webs, and coastal dynamics and ecosystems, including fisheries. This information is vital for scientists studying climate change and monitoring its effects on the oceans—including on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the ocean system that some experts have warned is at risk of collapse.

The announcement followed the abrupt dismissal of the entire National Science Board, the advisory committee to the National Science Foundation.

Two other arrays in the same network were discontinued during Donald Trump’s first term. The Global Argentine Basin Array in the South Atlantic was discontinued in 2018, after just three years of data collection, reportedly due to “budget constraints.” And the Global Southern Ocean Array was removed in 2020, after just five years of use.

According to a community update by Jim Edson, a principal investigator at the Ocean Observatories Initiative and senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the “descoping process” of the Endurance Array off the coast of Oregon and Washington has already begun and is expected to be completed this month.

“Array” is the formal word for “a whole heck of a lot of instruments.” The Endurance Array, for example, gathered a wide range of data products, from basics like salinity, temperature, acidity, and dissolved oxygen concentration, to “Turbulent Point Water Velocity,” “Photosynthetically Active Radiation,” and “Downwelling Irradiance.”

The decommissioning of the other three sites is scheduled for 2027. The $386 million observational network was completed in 2016 and had an anticipated life span of 25 years.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has been a major partner on the Ocean Observatories Initiative since its inception—designing, constructing, deploying, and maintaining the instrument arrays. When reached for comment, the director of public relations wrote, “NSF asked that we refer inquiries to them.”

In a telling demonstration of the thought and care that went into this decision, both NSF spokespeople who responded to my emailed questions with the same prepared word salad misprinted the organization’s name as Woods Hole Oceanographic “Institute.”

The provided statement is reprinted below in full:

“As part of its ongoing stewardship of its research infrastructure portfolio, the U.S. National Science Foundation communicated to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute [sic] (WHOI) on May 8, 2026 that it planned to adjust the scope of its support for select elements of the Ocean Observatories Initiative.

“NSF is not cancelling the Ocean Observatories Initiative. All previously collected OOI data will remain accessible through the OOI Data Center. 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. NSF remains committed to ocean science and will continue working with the scientific community on high-priority research objectives. Our decision was based in part on the recommendations of the science community outlined in the 2025 National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics report, Forecasting the Ocean: The 2025-2035 Decade of Ocean Science.”

Unfortunately, I can see how that report could provide ammunition to an unscrupulous administration intent on slashing support for science, especially climate science.

In the section about the Ocean Observatories Initiative, the authors of the 2025 report wrote, “there is concern within the broader oceanographic community whether OOI remains the right tool for meeting ocean science objectives in a landscape of limited resources and notable technological innovation.”

However, the authors also expressed a desire to “further increase the use of this major facility”—not to decommission four of five data collection sites. Even if there were and are ways that the Ocean Observatories Initiative could be improved, I am doubtful that this result is what the authors had in mind.

I emailed more than a dozen of the contributors to that report to share NSF’s statement and ask if they were aware that their work was being cited in this way. One contributor suggested I reach out to the co-chairs for comment, adding: “I am not aware of a spokesperson for NSF stating that the decision to dismantle OOI is based in part on the DS report; I can only refer to the report that is public and I think speaks for itself, specifically p. 88 Recommendation 4.2. on OOI.”

Jim Yoder, a co-chair of the Decadal Survey of Ocean Sciences, wrote, “The DSOS committee definitely did not want to see OOI disbanded. We wanted exactly what we stated in our Recommendation 4.2.”

That section recommended conducting “a revisioning and restructuring exercise” that might include analyzing the scientific contributions from the arrays, reconsidering the “goals and objectives of the program,” and considering “how to incorporate technology that may not have existed when OOI was originally envisioned” including “low-cost distributed observational networks.” But again, the authors seemed focused on improving the next iteration of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, not planning for or recommending its virtual and almost immediate end.

As Lisa Friedman reported for the New York Times, Trump tried to cut funding for the observation program by 80 percent in 2025 and 2026, and was rebuffed by Congress both times. Some Democrats have vowed to stop this latest attack on the program, and on climate and environmental science writ large.