The National Academies Just Set the Record Straight on Ocean Observing

For the past two weeks, I have been writing, mostly on LinkedIn, about a decision I find genuinely hard to fathom: the United States is dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). This is my first attempt to gather the whole story in one place — and to explain why a single statement from the National Academies, issued this month, matters so much.

First, what OOI is. It is a network of more than 900 instruments anchored from the sea surface to the deep seafloor at a handful of scientifically critical sites across the North Atlantic and North Pacific. Built at roughly $368 million and operating at about $48 million a year, it came online in 2016. It was engineered to run for about 25 years, returning continuous, openly available data on ocean currents, chemistry, and physics. The National Science Foundation, which funds it, has described it as the most advanced continuously operating ocean observing system in the world.

How did we get here? The short version is that this was tried before, and Congress said no. The administration proposed cutting OOI’s funding by roughly 80 percent in both 2025 and 2026, and each time Congress restored the money. In late May 2026, NSF nonetheless announced what it calls a “descoping” of OOI — a decision to remove all of the in-water infrastructure essentially over roughly 15 months. Ships are already at work: the Endurance Array off Oregon is being recovered, and moorings have been pulled from the Station Papa site in the Gulf of Alaska. Critics have also noted that OOI was named for elimination in the Project 2025 policy blueprint.

In short, an asset the public already paid for, that Congress voted twice to keep, and that has more than a decade of design life remaining, is being physically removed from the ocean — with no plan to store the instruments or sustain the data. That is the backdrop against which the National Academies just spoke.

Something important happened on June 9. The presidents of all three National Academies — Marcia McNutt of the National Academy of Sciences, Tsu-Jae Liu of the National Academy of Engineering, and Victor J. Dzau of the National Academy of Medicine — issued a joint public statement on the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). When the leaders of the country’s most authoritative scientific bodies speak together, in public, it is worth stopping to listen. I want to celebrate that they did — and to underline why it matters.

You can read their statement here: Statement by National Academies Presidents on the Importance of NSF’s Ocean Observatories Initiative

They affirmed what those of us in this field have long argued

The Academies were unequivocal about OOI’s value. Their committee found that the initiative has produced many successes over the past decade and can help answer urgent, emerging research questions — and that the importance of investing in ocean-observing infrastructure like OOI, for understanding the ocean and its relationship to human well-being, “cannot be overstressed.” That is not advocacy language. It is the considered judgment of a peer-reviewed National Academies process, and it confirms what the scientists who depend on these data have been saying all along: OOI is a national asset of exceptional value to research and to our basic understanding of the ocean.

They corrected a false justification

Here is the part that should give every taxpayer pause. In announcing its decision to begin pulling OOI out of the water, the National Science Foundation pointed to a 2025 National Academies report on the future of ocean science. According to the Academies themselves, NSF cited that report inaccurately. The committee did not recommend dismantling OOI. It recommended continued funding for the OOI components that support research priorities in the decade ahead — and it specifically said that any “revisioning” of OOI to improve it should be kept separate from the regular renewal process, not used as a pretext to end it.

This is a pattern worth naming. We are seeing, again and again, credible and carefully reasoned studies invoked to justify decisions that those very studies do not support — and sometimes flatly contradict. The independent reports that built the case for U.S. ocean observatories in the first place — going back to the National Research Council’s 2000 report Illuminating the Hidden Planet and the implementation studies that followed — argued for creating and sustaining this kind of infrastructure. The debates of that era were about how best to organize and sustain an integrated observing enterprise; they were never about whether to abandon it. To wield the very reports that recommended building ocean observing as a rationale for tearing it out is to stand their conclusions on their head.

OOI and the global system are different — and we need both

It also helps to be precise about what is at stake, because two very different systems are easily confused.

OOI is a set of richly instrumented sentinel sites — currently five arrays, each carrying many sensors from the sea surface to the deep seafloor, returning high-resolution, continuous measurements from a handful of scientifically critical locations. It gives us depth and density: the full water column, watched closely, at the places that matter most.

The Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) is something different and complementary. It includes Argo, the international fleet of nearly 4,000 autonomous profiling floats — currently about 3,990 — drifting independently across the world’s oceans. It gives us breadth: a thin but planet-wide picture, everywhere at once.

One is not a substitute for the other. A few deeply instrumented sentinels cannot map the whole ocean, and thousands of drifting floats cannot deliver the dense, full-depth, continuous record that a fixed array provides. We need both — the sentinel and the swarm — to understand an ocean that is changing faster than we can watch it.

Why this matters now

The Academies tied OOI directly to the questions policymakers most need answered: how ecosystem change affects important fisheries, the impacts of El Niño, and how growing access to the Arctic will challenge U.S. national security. They warned that other countries — including our competitors — are increasing their investments in ocean science even as we prepare to dismantle ours. Without assets like OOI, they wrote, we risk simply not having the data we need to address these issues at all.

One image accompanying their statement stays with me: the research vessel Sikuliaq steaming back into Seward, Alaska, its deck loaded with moorings freshly recovered from the Station Papa array. The instruments are already coming out of the water. That is what makes this urgent rather than abstract.

A note — and an ask

At The Ocean Foundation, we have thrown ourselves into this fight: analysis and public education, outreach to Congress, support for the institutions that operate these systems, and a proposed bridge fund to keep the instruments in the water while the courts and Congress weigh in. We do this work because the science is worth defending and because someone has to.

If you would like to help us keep at it, you can support our work by donating. No gift is too small, and everyone extends how long we can stay in this fight.

The National Academies have now made the scientific case as clearly as possible. The instruments should stay in the water. Let’s make sure they do.