Environment & Energy

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.

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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.”

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