Alaska is the nation's top fish-producing state, and its waters are warming twice as fast as the global average. So the decision to pull a deep-ocean monitoring network out of the Gulf of Alaska — just as salmon runs and crab stocks are collapsing — has set off alarm bells across the state's fishing industry.
In May, the National Science Foundation announced plans to decommission the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a nearly $368 million network of roughly 900 deep-sea instruments spread across the Pacific and Atlantic. The instruments track ocean chemistry, temperature, salinity, currents and wave action in real time, feeding data used by fishery managers, weather forecasters, coastal hazard planners and the military.
For Alaska, the loss that stings most is Ocean Station Papa, a deep-ocean observing system sitting in the Gulf of Alaska at a depth of nearly 14,000 feet. It is one of the only systems documenting, in real time, how the region's ocean is changing.
"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," said Michelle Stratton, a fisheries scientist and executive director of the Alaska Marine Community Coalition.
The state's commercial seafood industry is worth $5.3 billion and employs nearly 42,000 people, according to a recent report prepared for the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute. The monitoring data underpins decisions from how much fish can be harvested to when a marine heatwave or a dangerous storm surge is coming.
The NSF defends the move as housekeeping, not retreat. 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, she said, and the agency remains committed to ocean science.
Scientists who use the network are unconvinced this is the moment to go dark. "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, an oceanographer with the Alaska Ocean Observing System.
Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who spent 30 years at the National Weather Service, said the observatory's value is that it reads the entire water column, not just the surface — exactly the picture managers need as Chinook salmon and snow crab populations crash. The sensors also help forecasters see destructive storms coming, like Typhoon Halong, which largely destroyed the Western Alaska villages of Kipnuk and Kwigillingok last October.
The data void could hit Alaska's isolated, largely Indigenous coastal villages hardest. "We're not looking at just the biological crisis," Stratton said. "It's economic. It's cultural. It's a way of life, too."
Critics tie the decision to Project 2025, the conservative governing blueprint that cast federally funded ocean and atmospheric research as a source of "climate alarmism." For Tim Bristol, executive director of the conservation group SalmonState, the logic is backwards. "No matter where you are on a particular issue, you hear a desire, a call for more information, better data, more in-depth analysis," he said. "And this seems to be a sprint in the wrong direction."
Thoman offered a thin sliver of optimism — and a warning. Because the instruments sit in international waters that serve many nations, he expects others to fill the gap. "You know the Chinese could come and plunk down a buoy there tomorrow if they're inclined," he 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."