BY ANDY WALGAMOTT, NORTHWEST SPORTSMAN MAGAZINE
In a dramatic reversal, the plug has been pulled on the plug-pulling of an ocean monitoring system that provides important information for West Coast fishery managers and coastal communities.
The National Science Foundation announced today that “effective immediately, NSF will not proceed with further removal or descoping of equipment from the remaining arrays and will continue operations including planned maintenance” of the Ocean Observatories Initiative and that the Endurance Array, which had been pulled from the water, will be put back in after servicing it.
The move follows a Wednesday unanimous voice vote on a bill in the US Senate that would have blocked funding for the dismantling of the system off the Northwest Coast and elsewhere, bipartisan pushback that included from Alaska US Senator Lisa Murkowski (R), who sponsored the bill, and Washington US Senator Patty Murray (D), who had been pushing to save the system – and said there’s work still to be done.
“Dismantling this system is truly the height of stupidity – and a huge waste of taxpayer dollars that would threaten communities and fisheries in Washington state and all across the country,” said Murray in a press release. “Anything less than the full restoration and preservation of these systems is unacceptable, and I will keep fighting to ensure that happens and that this inane plan is dead for good.”
The New York Times reported that the second Trump Administration had tried to cut the program twice in its first two years but that Congress has come through both times.
Earlier this month, after NSF’s moves to dismantle ocean monitoring systems became public, Dr. Marisa Litz, a WDFW researcher who at North of Falcon provides an always-fascinating look at ocean and climate factors impacting salmon runs, called it “grim news.”
She said the Ocean Observatories Initiative and Endurance Array help profile and monitor the ocean from top to bottom via static and autonomous monitoring systems.
“Data collected by this network of science-driven sensors are freely available and provide measurements of temperature, salinity, chemistry (dissolved oxygen, nutrients, pH, etc.), currents, geology, and biological conditions of the ocean and seafloor. These data are vital for improved detection and forecasting of environmental changes and their effects on biodiversity, coastal ecosystems, and climate,” Litz said.
“For example, El Niño effects off Washington and Oregon usually show up when oceanographic circulation changes at the equator, leading to warm, slow-moving subsurface Kelvin waves that travel eastward and northward up from the South American Coast, transporting heat, and subtropical fish species, thousands of miles. In addition to oceanographic circulation, the arrays also provide information about the subsurface extent of marine heatwaves. In 2026, a super El Niño is forecasted that could be larger than the 2015 El Niño event, which, combined with an extensive heatwave of 2015, had negative ecosystem impacts all along the West Coast across multiple trophic levels from plankton to fish, to seabirds and whales. It would be great to document the effect of the 2026 El Niño event on coastal physical circulation and ecosystems,” she added.
If NSF had carried through with plans to remove the equipment, Litz said salmon forecasters would still at least have had access to sea surface temperature data from buoys riding the waves.
She called that sort of information “an important parameter” in predicting how many Chinook, coho and other salmon are out there to build fisheries around, “but the larger impact to oceanography is devastating, especially as these arrays have already been built and deployed for 10 years, supporting hundreds of research studies.”
Now, it appears these important data collection systems will continue.
