Days after the Trump administration vowed to dismantle a deep-ocean observation system, the European Union said it would bolster its own monitoring of the world’s oceans to improve climate forecasting and better anticipate changes to marine ecosystems.
The European Union announcement was long in the works, and not a response to the U.S. pullback. Still, officials in Brussels highlighted the contrast.
“To position the E.U. at the forefront of ocean observation is not a goal per se, it is a necessity, especially now that extremely worrying signals are coming from the other side of the Atlantic,” said Costas Kadis, the European Union’s commissioner for fisheries and oceans.
In recent days the National Science Foundation in the United States said it would begin dismantling a $368 million deep-ocean observation system that has been monitoring marine ecosystems and the effects of climate change since 2016.
That would involve the removal of 900 instruments anchored to the ocean bottom off Oregon, Washington State, Alaska, North Carolina, and an area between Greenland and Iceland known as the Irminger Sea.
The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, said it would invest $107 million, or 92 million euros, in ocean observation. More than half of the funding would be directed to an existing international ocean observation program sponsored by UNESCO, the World Meteorological Organization and other groups. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said Europe would “lead the race to understand our ocean.”
European officials framed the benefits of ocean monitoring as going beyond climate issues, helping with maritime security and defense.
The program announced Wednesday is relatively small. For example, the deep sea system that the U.S. had installed a decade ago, with instruments anchored in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, as well as between Greenland and Iceland, cost $48 million annually just to operate.
Maciej Berestecki, a European Commission spokesman, said the funding was “just a first step,” and that Europe would lobby other countries to invest in ocean observation and would host a pledging event in September. “I think it’s quite obvious that this initiative will be a long-term process,” he said.
Scientists say that ocean monitoring is an important way to understand the consequences of climate change. Rising seas pose a threat to coastal cities. Changing ocean temperatures open the door for invasive species. And scientists fear that a vital ocean current, known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, could weaken or even collapse as a result of climate change. That would throw severely disrupt global weather and likely shrink the world’s food supply.
“The oceanography community is increasingly worried about major ocean circulation changes ahead, with serious impacts on climate over land areas as well,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He called the European investments “important,” and said the U.S. does “not want people to know about climate change impacts.”
The National Science Foundation had said it would send ships this month to begin removing the instruments that are part of the system known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative. The process could take 15 months, it said. Democrats have said they intend to challenge the Trump administration’s move. The system had been designed to operate for 25 years, meaning any removal would cut off more than a decade of potential data.
Michael England, a spokesman for the National Science Foundation, said taking down the network “aligns with N.S.F.’s wider strategy to have a nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies.”
Jeanna Smialek contributed to this article from Brussels.
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