Expanding Ocean Observation Must Remain a Priority

The news that 2023 was the hottest year on record, especially in the ocean is another sobering reminder that planetary warming is accelerating at a dramatic rate.

Whether it’s carbon dioxide levels, ocean temperatures, sea levels, ecosystem-shifts, or melting ice sheets and declining Arctic sea ice, the ocean is changing faster than ever—and 2023 was a warning sign of more to come. It was also an exclamation point on the need to focus efforts on rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions and consider actively removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to avoid even more severe impacts.

Ocean-based climate solutions that are ready to implement today could help close the emissions gap—the difference between where greenhouse gas emissions are and where science tells us they should be—by as much as 35%. In addition, the promise of other marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) techniques is attracting attention from both scientists and investors in the growing carbon market. But there is a caveat. While we have a growing base of knowledge about how the ocean might respond to these interventions, we do not currently have the level of networked observations throughout the ocean water column required to evaluate the potential benefits and environmental impacts of mCDR at scale.

It is critical that the pace of scientific research stays ahead of the profit motive to guard against potentially harmful environmental impacts and to ensure that mCDR efforts are guided by strong science to validate claims of carbon uptake and long-term sequestration. This “blue carbon” market must be developed in a responsible way, with science supporting the careful development of safe, effective mCDR strategies through the establishment of proven environmental measurement, reporting, and verification (eMRV) capabilities.

MORE DATA NEEDED

But to do so, we need more eyes in the ocean. At present, there isn’t enough data to adequately assess how things like the increased pace and severity of marine heatwaves or changes in currents are affecting ocean health, let alone how a comprehensive effort to remove atmospheric carbon through iron fertilization or ocean alkalinity enhancement—two of the most promising mCDR methods listed in a recent National Academies report—might affect fisheries or other critical marine ecosystems.

Doing so is not easy, as the ocean is almost singularly configured to defy easy observation. Aside from the very surface, it is almost impenetrable to remote observation, making satellite-based sensors, while still necessary, largely blind to critical processes that occur at depth and across large volumes of the ocean. Environmental conditions such as high pressure, extremes of temperature, high winds, heavy seas, and the corrosive nature of seawater make designing, deploying, and maintaining observing networks and instruments throughout the volume of the open ocean complex and costly, but undeniably and fundamentally important to the long-term sustainability of human society.

TECH PLATFORMS

Currently there is about one autonomous profiling float in the global Argo program for every patch of ocean the size of Texas. These sensors drift below the surface for years and make a profile of basic oceanographic parameters—mostly salinity and temperature—from 2,000 meters to the surface every 10 days. Currently there are fewer than 4,000 of these “core Argo” floats, and their number recently declined due to attrition brought on by a host of factors, including cost and access to ships. The next generation of Argo floats, those that reach the deepest parts of the ocean to track humanity’s warming signal into the depths, and biogeochemical Argo floats that monitor the transport of carbon through the ocean, are slowly ramping up.

In addition, recent years have seen two arrays of moored instruments in the high-latitude, Southern Hemisphere that were part of the National Science Foundation-funded Ocean Observatories Initiative discontinued due to the cost and complexity of regularly accessing this distant and often hostile part of the globe. The regions those arrays occupied are critical parts of the global ocean current system known as the thermohaline circulation as well as linchpins in the global carbon cycle, both of which are fundamental drivers of Earth’s climate and have far-reaching effects on the lives and livelihoods of almost everyone on the planet.

EXPANDING OCEAN OBSERVATION

To properly support the knowledge-based decisions needed to prepare for the changes ahead, the global ocean observation capacity needs to be vastly expanded. One vision for shape this eventual expansion might take is what we are calling the Ocean Vital Signs Network (OVSN), an “internet of the ocean” that combines fixed and mobile platforms holding sensors that return a continuous stream of data from the air-sea interface to the seafloor that gives us an always-on, always-connected view of ocean health.

In December, a group of 124 organizations from around the globe signed the Dubai Ocean Declaration calling for increased ocean observation and delivered it to the leaders gathered at the annual UN climate conference (COP28) in Dubai, UAE COP28 also saw nearly $500 million in new ocean and climate-related funding commitments from sources including Bezos Earth Fund and the Ocean Resilience and Climate Alliance (ORCA)—a new consortium of climate and ocean institutions announced by Bloomberg Philanthropies at COP28 Ocean Pavilion—to ensure the health and vitality of the ocean.

Momentum for increasing ocean observations and modeling is increasing with a recent influx of funding, gifts, and grants to institutions like the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which received funding over the past three years from a combination of federal, corporate, and private sources totaling more than $85 million, including $25 million from WHOI board chair Paul Salem, to support a variety of climate solutions, including the advancement of eMRV capabilities supported by robust ocean monitoring.

These and other commitments are a literal and figurative drop in the ocean compared to the scope and scale of the task before us. And there is nothing more central to the future of humanity than our ability to understand the ocean that dominates our planet, and our lives.

This feature originally appeared in ON&T Magazine's January/February 2024 issue. Click here to read more.