The Trump administration’s National Science Foundation (NSF) has begun dismantling the infrastructure of a $368 million deep-ocean observing program critical to monitoring marine ecosystems, global currents, marine heat waves, and more, according to a 21 May announcement.
The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), funded by the NSF, has been collecting long-term oceanographic data at multiple deep-ocean sites since 2016. The information about ocean temperature, chemistry, currents, biological conditions, and more is used by scientists to understand a multitude of marine research questions including the activity of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a critical ocean current.
“I worry that … we’ll be losing this enormously valuable site where we could really contextualize and detect these changes going forward.”
“There’s a real danger that we lose the ability to keep looking for long-term changes [in the ocean]” as climate change alters Earth systems, said Hilary Palevsky, a marine biogeochemist who has used OOI data for a decade to study how the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide. “I worry that … we’ll be losing this enormously valuable site where we could really contextualize and detect these changes going forward.”
The NSF plans to remove all in-water arrays and infrastructure—including hundreds of deep-sea instruments—from four of the five currently-operating sites within the project: the Global Station Papa Array (in the Gulf of Alaska), Coastal Endurance Array (off the coasts of Oregon and Washington), Global Irminger Sea Array (southeast of Greenland), and Coastal Pioneer Array (off the coast of North Carolina). The removal is expected to occur over the next 15 months, though the process has already begun at the Endurance Array.
The Trump administration attempted previously to downscale OOI operations, proposing to cut its funding in 2025 and 2026, though Congress never approved the cuts.
The administration’s decision to dismantle the arrays “aligns with NSF’s wider strategy to have a nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies as well as a deliberate approach to smart life cycle management within its portfolio of research infrastructure,” Michael England, an NSF spokesman, told the New York Times.
As each array is dismantled, data streams will end, though all previously collected data from OOI networks will remain accessible, Jim Edson, principal investigator for the OOI, wrote in a letter to the oceanographic community.
Palevsky said there’s “a lot of real concern” among the oceanographic community that the Endurance Array is being dismantled just as an intense El Niño event—and associated marine heat wave—is expected this summer. “It would be especially important to be able to document the effect that [El Niño] is having on coastal physical circulation and ecosystems,” she said.
“We encourage the community to use the ten-plus years of OOI data by including it in proposals, publications, presentations, and conversations with colleagues. Continued engagement demonstrates the scientific impact and wide-ranging applications enabled by the OOI and its data, underscoring its importance as a resource for the oceanographic community,” the 21 May announcement stated.
There are other sources of data that researchers like Palevsky can use. But oceanographic research often requires stitching together different data sets, including OOI observations, satellite observations and observations from the U.S. research fleet. Many of these other sources of data are also facing uncertain futures.
Palevsky also worries about the loss of expertise that will occur as the program scales down. Installing these deep-sea observing networks was a huge achievement for U.S. science that will not be easy to replicate, she said. “If, in five years, we as a community decide we want to again be able to deploy this kind of complicated infrastructure in places that have really difficult oceanographic conditions … it’s going to be a lot of reinventing the wheel to figure out how to put things out again.”
“The complete cessation without community input or a community conversation about what’s going to happen to all this equipment and what’s going to happen with all of the expertise,” she said, “feels like a huge loss.”
—Grace van Deelen (@gvd.bsky.social), Staff Writer
Jan Erik Waider has a knack for capturing shorelines, volcanic eruptions, and glaciers at their most mesmerizing—shrouded in mist, glowing in the darkness, or illuminated by pale northern light. His atmospheric photographs of icy seas and rugged landscapes from Iceland to the Antarctic, focus on dramatic forms and cast remote places into a dreamy ethereality.
Most recently, Waider captured a striking phenomenon in the Baltic Sea, just off the coast of northern Germany. Fresh ice formed a thin layer on the rolling surface, creating faceted, polygon-like shapes that moved gently and rhythmically with the waves without breaking apart.
Waider’s aerial drone perspective creates an otherworldly, almost totally abstract effect. At first glance, it appears as though it could be a minimalist animation highlighting the interactions between water, light, and motion. “Soft evening light, fine crack lines, and shifting tones from warm gold to deep green turned this fleeting moment into a study of structure, depth, and calm,” Waider says.
See more on Waider’s YouTube channel, Instagram, and Behance.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Meditate to the Undulations of Baltic Sea Ice in Jan Erik Waider’s Hypnotic Videos appeared first on Colossal.
Taiwan’s coast guard said Sunday it has deployed vessels “to respond appropriately” to a Chinese operation in waters east of the island democracy, which it said “violates international law”.
It comes after Chinese state media reported Saturday that the “law enforcement operation” was in response to talks between Japan and the Philippines to draw a boundary in the affected waters.
China, which asserts Taiwan is part of its territory, called the talks “illegal” and has claimed exclusive control over the waters.
The Chinese ships have been monitored “throughout the entire process” and Taiwan “has deployed the necessary vessels to respond appropriately,” the Taiwanese coast guard said in a statement.
Taiwan said it had detected four Chinese government vessels departing from Xiamen port which had sailed outside Taiwanese restricted waters southwest of the island.
Taiwan’s coast guard dispatched more than five vessels “to assist with surveillance”.
The Chinese vessels were expected to arrive “in the relevant waters” on Sunday, the statement said, adding that “China does not enjoy any sovereign rights in the waters east of Taiwan”.
Tokyo and Manila said last month they would start formal talks “to delimit the maritime boundary” of an economic zone and continental shelf between them, angering Beijing.
On Saturday, Beijing’s transport ministry organised maritime police from coastal provinces Fujian and Guangdong to “conduct a special maritime traffic law enforcement operation in waters east of Taiwan Island”, state news agency Xinhua said.
The report did not give details on the operation, including how long it lasted or whether it was still ongoing, and it did not say whether maritime police dispatched ships to the area.
The operation was “a necessary action taken against Japan and the Philippines’ unilateral announcement they would start ‘negotiations on delimiting a maritime boundary'” near Taiwan, Xinhua added.
Taiwan said Wednesday it should be consulted on the Japan-Philippines talks.
Manila and Tokyo’s shared grievances over Chinese maritime territorial claims have seen them draw increasingly close in recent years.
Japan and China are in territorial and economic disputes in the East China Sea, where coast guard ships from both sides routinely stage tense standoffs.
Beijing has meanwhile deployed navy and coast guard vessels in the South China Sea, in a bid to bar the Philippines from strategically important reefs and islands, leading to a string of confrontations.
Taiwan’s coast guard said Saturday that a Chinese survey vessel had joined a coast guard ship in waters around Pratas Island in the northern part of the South China Sea.
The Taiwanese coast guard said it was “the first observed instance of Chinese coast guard and survey vessels acting in coordination to provoke Taiwan”.
Taiwan controls Pratas but Beijing also claims the island, along with most of the strategic waterway.
Greenhouse gas emissions are heating our atmosphere and oceans, and turning seawater more acidic. One of the myriad expected impacts of these conditions is a reduction in farming yields of shellfish, such as oysters and mussels. Coastal communities worldwide rely on these organisms for their economies and as a major food supply. However, exactly how climate change will affect oyster and mussel farming is not yet clear.
Using a novel experimental setup, Pernet et al. report new projected yields of oyster and mussel farming in the Mediterranean Sea for the years 2050, 2075, and 2100. Their results suggest that by 2050, yields of both shellfish will drop dramatically, with mussel production perhaps collapsing altogether.
Most prior studies have assessed shellfish in tank experiments under fairly idealized conditions that do not adequately reflect real-world aquaculture settings. This research team took a different approach. They developed a novel system for exposing oysters and mussels in tanks to realistic conditions using water pumped in from the sea, meaning the animals would experience fluctuations in acidity, temperature, and nutrients similar to those experienced by shellfish on nearby farms.
The researchers set up 12 experimental tanks on the French Mediterranean coast in the Thau lagoon, where shellfish farming is key for the local economy. In three tanks, oysters and mussels were exposed directly to pumped-in seawater under present, ambient conditions. The rest of the tanks received seawater that was first warmed and acidified in accordance with widely accepted climate projections for 2050, 2075, and 2100, with three tanks for each year.
The survival rate of oysters in the tanks with predicted 2100 conditions dropped by 7% compared to present rates, and their growth rate dropped by 40%. These results suggest that yields of farmed oysters in the Mediterranean could drop severely over the next several decades.
The mussels fared even worse. In fact, compared to oysters, mussels have a lower range of water temperatures in which they can survive, and the upper limit is already being exceeded in some summertime Mediterranean waters, leading to mass-mortality events. In the experimental tanks under present conditions, mussel mortality was about 40%, and nearly all mussels died under predicted 2050 conditions.
On the basis of these findings, the researchers call for the urgent development of strategies to protect Mediterranean shellfish farming, such as relocating mussel-farming operations to the cooler waters of open seas or developing cofarming with algae to increase resilience to climate change. (Earth’s Future, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EF005992, 2025)
—Sarah Stanley, Science Writer
Spikes, fans, florets, waves, and other characteristics of marine creatures continue to shape the work of Lisa Stevens. The Bristol-based artist’s vibrant practice revolves around ceramic sculptures inspired by sea urchins, coral, nudibranchs, and other underwater organisms. Each piece is unique, with numerous colorful glazes and textures, and they often take on a fantastical quality, incorporating hybrid features that conjure associations with celestial objects, anatomy, and other facets of nature.
Find more on Stevens’ Instagram, plus watch clay sculpting tutorials on YouTube.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Vibrant Sea Creatures Spring to Life in Lisa Stevens’ Textured Sculptures appeared first on Colossal.
When we picture the effects of melting glaciers, many of us think of rising seas and retreating ice streams. But along Greenland’s coastline, a quieter transformation is underway, one that is affecting how the ocean breathes and how it reacts to and buffers itself against change.
In Young Sound, a fjord carved into Greenland’s remote northeastern coast, decades of monitoring have revealed that glacial meltwater does not simply dilute the salt in seawater. As fresh water enters the ocean, it weakens the ocean’s natural chemical resistance to swings in acidity. This so-called buffering capacity keeps seawater pH in balance. The loss of buffering due to freshwater runoff leaves these coastal waters unusually sensitive to even small biological and environmental shifts.
Atmospheric warming is accelerating fastest in the Arctic, and with it come longer glacial melt seasons and increased freshwater runoff. The result is a coastal ocean that is both a frontline witness to climate change and a laboratory for understanding how the chemistry of the seas can change in unexpected ways.
Seawater chemistry is naturally buffered by dissolved ions that act as chemical shock absorbers.
Globally, the ocean absorbs about a quarter of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions each year. That uptake helps to slow climate change, but at a cost. The more CO2 that water absorbs, the more acidic it becomes. Thankfully, seawater chemistry is naturally buffered by dissolved ions—particularly carbonate, bicarbonate, and hydroxide—that act as chemical shock absorbers. These negatively charged ions, collectively called alkalinity, bind to the positive hydrogen ions released when carbonic acid forms, keeping the ocean’s pH relatively stable compared with the more variable conditions in freshwater rivers and lakes.
The polar oceans play a special role in this balance and in the global carbon cycle because cold waters at high latitudes take up carbon from the atmosphere faster than warm tropical waters. Yet these regions are also changing the most rapidly.
For 20 years, our team at Aarhus University has measured salinity, temperature, and carbon chemistry in Young Sound. Each August, we make the 2-day journey to northeast Greenland, where we spend the month sailing down the 90-kilometer-long fjord to capture these valuable measurements (Figure 1).
During the time we have monitored this ecosystem, the melt season has lengthened, with sea ice–free conditions now lasting 8 days longer than 20 years ago. Glaciers feeding the fjord are also thinning and retreating, discharging about 5.5 million cubic meters more water into the fjord each year. These changes have freshened the coastal ocean and subtly, but significantly, altered its chemistry.
Fjords like these have long been known as major CO2 sinks. Surface waters near glaciers often have very low CO2 concentrations, creating a disequilibrium between CO2 levels in the surface ocean and the atmosphere that draws carbon out of the air. But how or why these glacial ecosystems act as carbon sinks and what mechanisms are at play haven’t been thoroughly described. We have also been deeply curious about what else happens when fresh water enters the sea. What are the hidden consequences of this change?
To find out, we paired our long-term field observations with controlled lab experiments in which we mixed glacial meltwater with seawater. Controlled experiments allow us to dig into the nuances of chemical changes that are impossible to measure in the field. We also ran mixing models that allowed us to estimate how the chemistry of those mixed waters responds to small shifts in biological activity or mineral interactions.
The results were striking. When meltwater mixes with seawater, it not only reduces salinity but also dilutes alkalinity, the measure of how well water can neutralize acid and buffer against pH change. This weakening of buffering capacity means that even small changes in photosynthesis or respiration can drive much larger swings in CO2 uptake and acidity than they would in more saline waters.
We found that in the freshened waters of Young Sound, these processes have 2–3 times the influence on carbon uptake that they do farther out at sea. In effect, meltwater primes the coastal ocean to overreact, amplifying any ecosystem changes that might occur.
Measurements from around Greenland show that this is not just a theoretical risk. Surface waters are measurably more acidic where meltwater inputs are high. The biological consequences of this trend are still uncertain, but species living at the edge of their tolerance, such as shell-forming plankton and Arctic cod larvae, could face growing stress as the chemistry of their habitat fluctuates more widely.
The findings confirm that fjords absorb carbon as a result of biological activity and glacial input but indicate that they do so in a fragile, easily tipped state.
Our study adds nuance to conventional perceptions of carbon cycling in fjords, long seen as places where atmospheric CO2 is drawn down. The findings confirm that fjords absorb carbon as a result of biological activity and glacial input but indicate that they do so in a fragile, easily tipped state. Slight shifts in the processes that pull CO2 out of the air could tip the scales in either direction: toward even more uptake and the accompanying acidification or toward a release of CO2 to the atmosphere.
This chemical sensitivity explains why Arctic fjords can show such strong seasonal and spatial swings in carbon chemistry and why predicting their long-term role in the carbon cycle is difficult. As glaciers retreat and meltwater inputs grow, those sensitivities are likely to intensify.
At first glance, changes in how seawater in the narrow, remote fjords of Greenland reacts to glacial melt might sound like a local concern. But the chemical processes at play have global resonance.
The Arctic Ocean as a whole is freshening, driven by accelerating ice melt as well as by increasing river discharge and changing weather bringing more precipitation to the region. Although river water, which arrives from the six great Arctic rivers of North America and Eurasia, is more alkaline than glacial melt, its alkalinity is only about half that of seawater. In other words, river runoff also increases the ocean’s chemical sensitivity. Fresh water also delivers organic matter from permafrost, fine sediments from glaciers, and tannin-rich runoff from tundra soils, each of which can influence carbon cycling and further compound changes already underway.
Similar patterns of increased rainfall and runoff reducing surface salinity are emerging around the Antarctic Peninsula, the Gulf of Alaska, and the North Atlantic. Almost everywhere that fresh water enters the ocean, it lowers alkalinity and limits the ocean’s ability to buffer change.
Our results also carry lessons for researchers and companies contemplating ocean chemistry interventions as ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. One proposed approach, ocean alkalinity enhancement, involves adding crushed minerals such as lime, olivine, and basalt to seawater to both counteract acidification and increase the ocean’s capacity to take up CO2.
Glacial systems already perform a natural version of this experiment by grinding rock into fine sediment and discharging it into the ocean. Minerals in this sediment react with seawater and shape its carbon chemistry.
Our study suggests that such reactions are especially potent in freshwater-influenced coastal regions, where reduced buffering capacity may amplify chemical responses not only from natural biological processes but also from potential human attempts to alter seawater chemistry. Thus, understanding the balance between carbon uptake and chemical vulnerability will be essential before any large-scale interventions are attempted.
Coastal communities from Greenland to Alaska to northern Eurasia depend on Arctic waters as part of their cultural identity and, by way of fisheries and tourism, for their economic and food security. As chemical buffering capacity declines, coastal ecosystems may become more susceptible to acidification and other environmental stresses. Small changes in temperature, ecosystem metabolism, or nutrient inputs could then have outsized effects on the marine life that supports these communities.
As coastal glaciers retreat and meltwater rivers carve new paths to the sea, they are doing more than raising sea level and reshaping coastlines. They are rewiring ocean chemistry.
At the same time, changing conditions in coastal Arctic ocean regions complicate scientific modeling of carbon cycling and climate feedbacks, which typically relies on averaged estimates of the ocean’s chemical reactivity. With meltwater making the coastal ocean more reactive, these seas may absorb or release CO2 more variably than how global predictions would suggest. In addition to the real effects on local ecosystems, seawater chemical variability could also affect the accuracy of modeled global carbon budgets, which we use to inform future climate projections and guide international policy goals.
As coastal glaciers retreat and meltwater rivers carve new paths to the sea, they are doing more than raising sea level and reshaping coastlines. They are rewiring ocean chemistry, leaving it fresher and more easily disturbed.
The chemical sensitivity we see in Greenland’s fjords today may be a preview of what is to come in many coastal regions. If so, then we must be concerned with not only how much CO2 the ocean can absorb but also how stably it can hold that CO2 in a rapidly changing world.
Henry C. Henson (hch@ecos.au.dk), Aarhus University, Denmark
Login