Alaskans Reel From the Loss of National Science Foundation Ocean-Monitoring Instruments

The upcoming loss of a deep-ocean monitoring system is triggering deep anxiety in Alaska, the nation’s top fish-producing state, where temperatures are warming twice as quickly as the global average.

The National Science Foundation announced plans in May to decommission the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a nearly $368 million network of scientific instruments that tracks ocean chemistry, wave action, water temperature, salinity and a host of other metrics.

The real-time information from these ocean observatories helps scientists, fishery managers, coastal hazard planners and even the military plan and prepare for the future. Whether that’s calculating how much fish can be harvested or when a marine heatwave or giant wave action may be occurring, the data is used by a plethora of sources.

“It helps us see where we’re going and what’s coming at us,” said Jan Newton, University of Washington affiliate professor of biological oceanography.

The NSF’s decision to pull the observatories from the water has alarm bells ringing in fishing circles of Alaska, home to a $5.3 billion commercial seafood industry that employs nearly 42,000 people, according to a recent report that McKinley Research Group prepared for the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute.

Michelle Stratton, executive director of the Alaska Marine Community Coalition, said the loss of Ocean Station Papa, the deep-ocean observing system situated in the Gulf of Alaska at a depth of nearly 14,000 feet, means the state will lose one of its only systems that documents how the ocean is changing in real time.

“We’re in the middle of salmon crashes, crab collapses and repeated marine heatwaves, and this decision takes away the data we rely on to understand what’s happening and how to manage these fisheries,” Stratton said.

As for why NSF is pulling the scientific hardware, spokesperson Cassandra Eichner said the decision “aligns with the 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.”

All previously collected data will remain accessible and the NSF remains committed to ocean science, Eichner said.

But critics say the decision to take down the ocean observatory network, which consists of some 900 deep-sea instruments distributed across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, aligns with Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for governing prepared by the Heritage Foundation and, to some extent, enacted by the Trump administration.

Project 2025 cast government-sponsored oceanic and atmospheric research as a regular source of “climate alarmism,” particularly within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its various agencies.

The oceans are one of the most unexplored, unmeasured and, ultimately, poorly understood regions of Earth, said Rick Thoman, climate specialist with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who spent 30 years at the National Weather Service.

What the Ocean Observatories Initiative does, Thoman said, is to shed light on what’s happening in the deep, dark depths of the underwater world, not just at the surface. 

“Losing the information provided by Ocean Station Papa on how the ocean is changing with a warming climate is like driving down a dark freeway with no lights on,” said Carol Janzen, oceanographer with the Alaska Ocean Observing System. 

Since Alaska has suffered intensive marine heatwaves in recent years, along with population crashes of species like Chinook salmon and snow crab, the last thing managers and scientists want to see is the loss of deep-ocean monitoring data, Thoman said.

“The value of this network is that you get oceanographic information from the entire water column,” he added.

Fast-warming Alaska has been battered by intense storms of late, including Typhoon Halong, which largely destroyed the Western Alaska villages of Kipnuk and Kwigillingok last October. The mostly Yupik villages were home to more than 1,000 people, many of whom evacuated to Anchorage and are still living there while decisions are made about what to do next: rebuild or move to higher ground. 

The state is also preparing for El Niño conditions later this summer.

Ocean Station Papa’s sensors and other instruments help weather forecasters and emergency response officials know ahead of time when super-storms like Halong are about to come barreling through.

“We’re looking at ocean temperatures, salinity, current, wave height and direction, wind stress,” Stratton said. “Those all feed into models that NOAA and universities use to tell us how storm systems intensify, how water levels along the coast are rising or falling, where and when we should expect the next big flooding event.” 

The loss of Ocean Station Papa could make Alaska’s isolated, largely Indigenous coastal villages even more vulnerable.

“We’re seeing diseases directly linked to food security, income, intergenerational knowledge, community stability. So we’re not looking at just the biological crisis. It’s economic. It’s cultural. It’s a way of life, too,” Stratton added.

For longtime fisheries advocate Tim Bristol, executive director of the nonprofit SalmonState, pulling monitoring instruments out of the ocean seems counterintuitive.

“No matter where you are on a particular issue, you hear a desire, a call for more information, better data, more in-depth analysis, and this seems to be, you know, a sprint in the wrong direction,” Bristol said.

Thoman, the weather and climate specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said that may be true. But even if the United States, a longtime leader in the sciences, wants to bury its head in the sand about a changing ocean and warming temperatures, that doesn’t mean the information will go away.

Other nations will step in to fill the data void created by the loss of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, he believes, as their locations in international waters provide valuable data for numerous countries.

“You know the Chinese could come and plunk down a buoy there tomorrow if they’re inclined,” Thoman said. “If anyone thinks that the U.S., by stopping doing this, is going to stop the monitoring or stop our understanding of this, they are woefully mistaken. All of these things are international efforts.”