Senate Measure Halts National Science Foundation Plan to Remove Ocean Sensors

The National Science Foundation announced last week that it would halt removal of hundreds of scientific instruments from ocean waters near the Pacific Northwest, North Carolina, and the Irminger Sea south of Greenland. Grist reported that the agency also plans to reinstall equipment already removed.

The move followed a bipartisan Senate measure that blocked the action, which had been part of the Trump administration effort to cut funding for the Ocean Observatories Initiative.

Merkley added that lawmakers would continue fighting to preserve data access for scientists, fishermen, and coastal communities. The Ocean Observatories Initiative began operating in 2016 and had already been shielded by Congress from proposed cuts in the 2025 and 2026 federal budgets. The program is now scheduled to continue for at least another decade.

U.S. ocean monitoring efforts face separate funding pressures. The Argo program, which has deployed thousands of battery-powered floats to collect temperature, salinity, and heat data since the first units went out more than 25 years ago, relies on the United States for roughly half its floats.

Those floats require replacement every five years. Funding for the biogeochemical sensor portion of Argo is projected to end December 31, 2026, with the final floats scheduled for deployment this fall. Lynne Talley, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, who has helped lead the Argo program, said the United States is losing ground in ocean observations it has led for decades.