The choice to remove Ocean Station Papa from the Gulf of Alaska’s floor is subtly unsettling. It’s almost physically unsettling, not just politically. Located in the center of the Alaska Gyre, a massive rotating current that has influenced Pacific weather, fisheries, and marine ecosystems for millennia, the station is anchored to the seabed more than 14,000 feet below the surface. Since the end of the Cold War, it has been down there gathering data. And at some point in the upcoming year, it won’t be.
The Ocean Observatories Initiative, a network of about 900 instruments dispersed throughout the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans that together cost $368 million to build and were intended to operate for three decades, was to be “descope” according to a May announcement from the National Science Foundation. Although the process has already started, it is anticipated that in-water arrays off Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, North Carolina, and southeast Greenland will be removed by September 2027. The claimed savings are close to $50 million annually. That figure is difficult to accept in the context of a federal budget that allotted $1.5 trillion for defense alone.
Ocean Station Papa is more than just a buoy. Each of the three sizable, circular moorings, which are arranged in a triangle, is equipped with sensors that measure temperature, salinity, pressure, water chemistry, and nutrient concentrations not only at the surface but also throughout the water column. Most people don’t realize how important that depth is. Papa’s deep measurements revealed to scientists how much heat was truly stored in the ocean during “the blob,” the devastating marine heatwave that ravaged the Pacific between 2014 and 2016, killing fish populations and starving seabirds from California to the Aleutians. They would have been speculating without that information.
The timing is extremely regrettable, according to Russ Hopcroft, chair of the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ oceanography department. Papa is right in the path of a potential super El Niño that forecasters have already warned could form in the Pacific this summer. It’s possible that nothing will change this year despite the removal of the station. It’s also possible that one less vital sensor in the water will be necessary for scientists to navigate one of the biggest climate events in recent memory. No one can predict with certainty which it will be, and that uncertainty is a problem in and of itself.
Alaska is particularly affected by this loss. Nearly 42,000 jobs are supported by the state’s commercial seafood industry, which brings in $5.3 billion. To determine catch limits for groundfish, crab, and salmon, fishery managers rely on long-term ocean data. Papa’s constant readings assist managers in determining the direction of the ocean, which is a moving target rather than a stable backdrop for these decisions. The Alaska Marine Community Coalition’s Michelle Stratton put it bluntly: marine heatwaves are recurring, salmon populations are plummeting, and crab populations have collapsed. This is precisely the wrong time to stop taking measurements.
This loss is more widespread and more difficult to measure. No satellite pass or research cruise can match the decades’ worth of data that Ocean Station Papa has gathered. Once the instruments are gone, it is impossible to recreate what the ocean was doing on a specific day in 2026. That record just ends. This is the point at which future researchers, whoever they are working on the next crisis, will run out of data.
According to the NSF, the retreat is a “nimbler approach” in line with changing scientific priorities. A continuous, real-time record of one of the world’s most climate-sensitive ocean zones is difficult to prioritize. As this develops, there’s a sense that the decision is more about the larger political endeavor of destroying the infrastructure that makes climate change observable and quantifiable than it is about scientific strategy. That might not be altruistic. However, it’s difficult to ignore the pattern.
