An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: In May, the federal government announced without warning that it would take apart a network of ocean monitoring systems that it had spent over $350 million to build. No reason was given for the decision to shut down the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), but suspicion immediately focused on the network's role in tracking climate change. But the OOI also provides data that's useful for weather forecasting and fisheries management, leading to widespread opposition. Today, it appears that the opposition has won, as the government will announce that it's reversing the decision. The big remaining question is how much damage the OOI took during the intervening month. [...] The OOI is a federally supported resource that provides ocean data for use by academic researchers, government planners, and private companies. It consists of arrays of monitoring systems in several locations in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that can track things like currents, salinity, chemical levels, temperatures, and tectonic activity. (There are over 100 individual entries on the page that display the data gathered by the system.) Obviously, there are many potential uses of that data. The fact that it has been gathered continuously for a decade means it can help track changes in how carbon dioxide and heat enter the oceans. This is probably what made it a target for the climate change denialists who helped set the Trump administration's policy. Those policymakers are perfectly happy to annoy people with environmental concerns, but they apparently neglected to consider how upset everyone else would be about losing access to the other data. The ensuing public backlash led the Senate on Wednesday to unanimously agree with a measure that would block the government from taking down the OOI. Today's decision may indicate that the administration recognized it had gotten itself into a fight it knew it was losing. The National Science Foundation formally announced the decision, stating: "effective immediately, [it] will not proceed with further removal or descoping of equipment from the remaining arrays and will continue operations including planned maintenance." The agency added that it "appreciates the concerns raised by the range of stakeholders that have informed us they rely on data" from the OOI. The NSF also said it would "issue a Dear Colleague Letter to collect input from stakeholders and convene an expert panel to assess observational needs, evaluate available data sources, consider responses ... and help the agency identify a sustainable path for NSF's ocean observing systems."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The world's oceans are under "severe and accelerating" pressure from human activities, with the rate of sea-level rise double that of a decade ago, according to a damning assessment from the United Nations. The "intensifying" stressors, which include pollution and large-scale industrial fishing, are cumulative, said the report, resulting in widespread biodiversity loss and putting ocean systems under "severe strain." The UN's third World Ocean Assessment, which reflects the work of nearly 600 scientists from 86 countries, looked at the oceans' health from 2021-25. The previous report, that covered up to 2018, found persistent degradation of the marine environment. Five years on, scientists know more about the cumulative impacts of anthropogenic pressures on the ocean, and the latest report shows just how much of the damage has been done in the past few years. The scientists' key findings include: - Sea levels continue to rise at an increasing rate, from 2mm a year prior to 2015 to 4.3mm a year in 2023. - 16% of the increase in global ocean heat since 1955 occurred after 2018. - The greatest relative warming has been observed in the Atlantic Ocean and the southern parts of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. - Large gaps in knowledge persist -- with only 27% of the ocean floor mapped by 2025, deep-sea ecosystems remain poorly understood. Lukas Meus, Greenpeace's global ocean campaigner, said: "We are calling on governments to create fully protected ocean sanctuaries that will close vast areas of the ocean off from extractive human activities. Governments have promised to protect 30% of the world's ocean by 2030 -- the minimum scientists say we need for the ocean to be able to recover."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Trump administration is moving to dismantle the National Science Foundation's $368 million Ocean Observatories Initiative, a network of more than 900 deep-sea instruments used to monitor ocean currents, marine ecosystems, carbon absorption, heat waves, fisheries, coastal flooding, and climate change. The NSF said it would send ships in June to begin the removal of the instruments anchored off Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North Carolina, and an area between Greenland and Iceland known as the Irminger Sea. The New York Times reports: The ocean observation system began operating in 2016 and was expected to continue for 25 years. Jim Edson, a marine meteorologist who led the Ocean Observatories Initiative, called it "the world's most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems." When it was first proposed, the science foundation said it was important to have a long-term presence at scientifically important sites in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Removing the instruments could take 15 months. Seismic instruments positioned around an active underwater volcano off Oregon will continue operating until 2028. Each observation station consists of several moorings that secure long arrays of devices connected to wires. The devices measure ocean currents as well as chemical and biological conditions from the water's surface down thousands of feet. The instruments were hardened to resist the pressure of the deep ocean, corrosive seawater as well as marine plants and animals that can foul electronics. Remotely controlled robotic vehicles and gliders around the moorings collect and transmit data to research laboratories. It cost $48 million annually to operate the network. The Trump administration repeatedly tried to shutter it, proposing to cut its funding by 80 percent in both 2025 and again in 2026. Congress pushed back, restoring the money. To try to reduce costs, managers turned off some of the instruments and collected less data, according to a December 2025 presentation about the observatories at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, a nonprofit organization of scientists. Still, the science foundation moved ahead to decommission the observatory network.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ScienceAlert reports: In the molten ocean of iron churning in Earth's outer core, a section deep beneath the Pacific Ocean suddenly reversed direction and started moving eastward against the planet's usual westward flow. This happened in 2010, according to satellite measurements of Earth's magnetic field, and scientists are still trying to figure out what caused it... [I]t seemed to have a large, wave-like structure — as though a chunk of molten core material suddenly thought better of where it wanted to go, surging in the other direction... This finding suggests that there are processes that can influence it strongly enough to alter its behavior in bulk — and that our planet's interior may be more dynamic and variable than we thought. A new analysis captures what we know so far — and "It's from the roiling, molten, conducting metal at Earth's heart that the planetary magnetic field is generated... vital to our continued existence. It helps keep the atmosphere we breathe in and harmful cosmic radiation out."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Citing new research, the Associated Press reports that "modest gains in the fight to curb climate change have dialed back the most catastrophic of future heating." That's the good news. But the same research "also confirmed that there's no chance to limit warming to the international goal set in 2015." Researchers' new list of seven plausible carbon pollution scenarios for the future are pushing aside two staples of climate policy: the extremes on either end. The extremes have become less probable in the past several years because of how we power our world. Carbon dioxide, released from the burning of gas, oil and coal, is chiefly responsible for warming. Increasing use of green energies, like solar, wind and geothermal, which don't emit carbon dioxide, have lowered top end carbon pollution projections. However, because those changes haven't been fast enough, the bottom end projections have risen. The Paris climate agreement in 2015 set a goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, or the mid-1800s, giving rise to the mantra "1.5 to stay alive," but now scientists say that even their best case scenario still shoots past that signature temperature mark. On the other end, those same new scenarios no longer include the coal-heavy future that would lead to 4.5 degrees Celsius (8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100, a scary scenario that many scientific studies used in their future projections. The new proposed worst case scenario has an end-of-the-century warming of about 3.5 degrees Celsius (6.3 degrees Fahrenheit), a full degree (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) less than the old scenario, while the updated best case future is a couple tenths of a degree Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than previously theorized, squeezing past the Paris goal, said climate scientist Detlef Van Vuuren of Utrecht University, lead author of a recent study laying out future scenarios. "There is kind of a narrowing of the futures. It cannot be as bad as we thought, but it cannot be as good as we hoped," said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. The scenarios include a "middle" one where by the end of the century the world warms 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, which is roughly the path society is currently on, scientists said... Because carbon pollution keeps rising globally and stays in the atmosphere for about century, the best case scenario is for warming to shoot past the 1.5 degree mark, peak at 1.7 degrees Celsius (3.1 degrees Fahrenheit) for maybe as long as 70 years, and eventually somehow come back down below 1.5 degrees if a technology can be designed to remove massive amounts of carbon from the air, said nine of the 10 scientists interviewed for this article. The world is warming at a pace of a tenth of a degree Celsius (nearly 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit) every five years, they said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.