The National Science Foundation will begin dismantling a sprawling network of over 900 deep-sea sensors stationed in Pacific waters off the coasts of Oregon, Washington state, and Alaska, as well as Atlantic sites off North Carolina and the Irminger Sea near Iceland. Arguably, the worst part: Subsurface temperature readings from this network’s sensors in the Pacific would have likely been critical to providing more accurate modeling and forecasts to protect against deadly El Niño events in the future. “It’s a crippling loss of information,” as oceanographer Ed Dever at Oregon State University, who helped direct these sensors’ operations in the northern Pacific, told the Associated Press. The scuttled instrument network comprises the core of the NSF’s Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), a program that the second Trump administration has repeatedly tried and failed to kill since 2025. The NSF said that it plans to remove one of these sensors, anchored by a research buoy 260 feet (80 meters) under the ocean’s surface near Oregon, on June 16. But the total OOI network—a sunk cost that taxpayers have already paid $386 million to construct—would take until 2027 to completely dismantle.