04/06/2026
Trump administration dismantles critical ocean-floor observation network
In line with Project 2025’s recommendations, over 900 advanced deep-sea sensors are being removed from the ocean floor, cutting off critical real-time data used by global researchers to track climate change.
The Trump administration is dismantling a $370 million ocean-floor observatory network installed a decade ago to collect critical climate data on coastal environments, marine ecosystems, and powerful global ocean currents.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced it will begin removing more than 900 deep-sea instruments this June. The decommissioning will pull monitoring hardware from the waters of Oregon, Washington State, Alaska, North Carolina, and a critical region between Greenland and Iceland known as the Irminger Sea.
The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) began full operations in 2016. The monitoring system was engineered to provide continuous, real-time climate data to global researchers for 25 years.
Jim Edson, a marine meteorologist who led the initiative, described the network as “the world’s most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems.”
The closure of this climate data network follows policy laid out by conservative strategist the Heritage Foundation. The shutdown was recommended in their Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” document – a 900-page document designed specifically to act as a blueprint for the Trump presidency.
In 2024, Project 2025’s authors explicitly targeted the network, claiming the OOI was “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism” and advising that “the preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”
Since taking office, Trump’s administration has consistently targeted the network’s budget, and proposed 80% funding cuts in both 2025 and 2026. While Congress successfully pushed back on both occasions to restore the necessary money, the NSF moved ahead with decommissioning, despite managers previously attempting to save the network by limiting data collection to cut costs.
To date, the OOI system has provided critical data used to understand how the ocean absorbs atmospheric greenhouse gases, how marine heat waves threaten commercial fisheries, and how sea levels trigger coastal flooding along the East Coast.
Fixed 2,800 metres below the surface, the Irminger Sea moorings have been crucial to tracking dangerous changes occurring in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC), a global current system that scientists fear could be destabilising.
Moorings stretching west off Newport, Ore, and Grays Harbor, Wash, captured data about temperature, acidity and oxygen data used by the commercial fishing industry to anticipate devastating environmental shifts.
In line with Project 2025, over 900 deep-sea sensors are being removed from the ocean floor, cutting off data used to track climate change
