🌎 Trump is dismantling the entire (900 instrument) O. O. I. Ocean Monitoring System

[underpants]

The Trump administration is dismantling the $368 million Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), a critical network monitoring marine ecosystems and climate change. Starting in June 2026, the National Science Foundation will begin removing over 900 deep-sea instruments across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Dismay as Trump officials to dismantle key ocean monitoring system
Ocean Observatories Initiative, $368m network that has provided crucial climate data, latest victim of Trump cuts

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/02/trump-administration-ocean-observatories-initiative

The notice, issued on 21 May, came just days after Trump fired all members of the independent board that oversees the NSF. It outlined plans to remove all in-water infrastructure from observation sites off the coasts of North Carolina, Oregon, Washington and Alaska, as well as from the Irminger Sea, a marginal sea between Greenland and Iceland


Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, said on X: “Fossil fuel is heating our oceans by the zettajoule, so Trump’s corrupt fossil fuel stooges want to turn off the monitors.”

“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 (professor focusing on marine biogeochemistry and oceanography at Boston College) said. “Being able to have instruments, both actually out in the atmosphere floating in the surface ocean, as well as surviving through the really deep mixing and waves in the subsurface.”

Palevsky also warned that rebuilding such a network in the future would be difficult, saying: “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.