June 4, 2026 — The Trump administration has quietly removed an array of floating ocean observatories from waters off the Washington coast, KUOW has learned.
Their removal is part of a national dismantling of a network of sophisticated data buoys in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
The National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency created in 1950 to support scientific research, announced in May that it had started what it called a “descoping” of its Ocean Observatories Initiative.
Those observatories monitor surface and underwater conditions 24/7 in what the science foundation calls “the most technologically advanced observational networks in the oceans.”
The moored buoys keep the pulse of the oceans as their temperature and chemistry rapidly change and provide real-time updates to mariners heading out into possibly dangerous waves. Autonomous “gliders” also roam the ocean, gathering data on the go.