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Comment by wxw | Hacker News Reader

> Starting this week, the Ocean Observatories Initiative will lose a network of more than 900 ocean sensors from waters off Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North Carolina and Greenland.

> By 2027, the National Science Foundation will have dismantled most of the system, which had been slated to run another 15 to 20 years.

> Scientists had seen warning signs as the Trump administration’s proposed 2026 budget included a 55% cut to the science foundation. Official word to begin shutting down arrived in early May.

Defunding science is embarassing and sad.

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Don’t forget wantonly destructive.

Why not just sell them to some other country? Surely Canada would buy the in-place sensors and take them over.

They explicitly do not want them. They will pay companies to abandon renewable energy projects that have already planned / started.

You think this is done to save costs? NO! This is costing more money to actively dismantle them than it would be to just abandon them. The administration is intentionally and specifically trying to destroy scientific evidence of climate change. If they just abandoned them, the next administration could reactivate and repair them.

People in the libertarian SV techbro world actually fall for the randian crap and believe that’s what they are getting.

And that’s the charitable interpretation.

Beyond the regime's hatred of science, they also hate Canada, so that would never happen.

If we sell them to another country, then that other country will gather the data and publish it. The point of the Trump administration is that the data not be gathered.

I work for an organization that uses equipment like this. We can't afford to buy or staff this scale of equipment, and the Canadian government (DFO in particular) might have the cash to purchase the equipment but nowhere near the staff. Sensor networks are a lot of work. The ocean likes to break stuff. You need to monitor nodes extensively. It requires a broad skill set, both physically and digitally, backed by a lot of knowledge and ideally experience. These people aren't very common, so building a team to support this network outside of the USA would not be trivial.

Maybe you could part it out to a number of orgs and governments, but I doubt the US government has much interest in putting in the labour to facilitate that. This entire project seems like it's designed to be offensive as it is to be anything else.

It's an enormous shame.

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