Previewing the Marine Science of Tomorrow

We can thank the ocean for giving us life through the oxygen it produces — and for giving us the chance to study it well into the future. For the scientists who do the latter, the job ahead of them remains more consequential than ever before as people and marine organisms and ecosystems confront the tidal wave of a warming world.

In a February report published by the National Academies, a congressionally-chartered nonprofit that advises government science policy, a group of researchers came together to consider what their oceanic field of science could and should look like by the year 2035. Titled Forecasting the Ocean, the publication sets the contemporary goal of making the science of ocean forecasting pertinent for all humankind, while also setting the stage for advanced technologies to help ensure the future health and well-being of those living under the sea and on land.

“I think there’s this misconception that it’s only coastal communities that get impacted by ocean processes, and that is just not true. Because the ocean really influences weather and climate everywhere on Earth, and so the forecasting the ocean piece is not just important to coastal communities, but really for all communities everywhere,” said Dr. Tuba Özkan-Haller, dean and professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University and co-chair of the report committee.

As part of the publication, the committee encourages marine scientists to focus their attention on three key areas of research: Ocean and Climate, Ecosystem Resilience, and Extreme Events. For the first, it might mean examining the sea’s abilities as a global carbon sink and heat absorber by keeping track of tipping points related to the collapse of ice sheets and an ever fragile Atlantic Ocean current. For the second, it might mean investigating how organisms cope with change by monitoring the impacts of overfishing and deep-sea mining. For the third, it might mean exploring ways to predict disasters by upgrading forecasts of earthquakes and tsunamis.

For all three areas, there is a need for fundamental science to be a driving force of progress at the same time. “The basic research, that’s at this point curiosity-driven, almost inevitably ends up solving the problems of the future that we don’t even know we have right now,” said Dr. Lisa Levin, Professor Emerita at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego, former independent reviewer of the report, and current member of the National Academies Ocean Studies Board.

Looking Forward
In order to comprehend the ocean, you need the best tools for the job. But reach inside the domestic ocean science toolbox, and you’ll find that the equipment is becoming quite rusty. Eight out of the Academic Research Fleet’s 17 vessels will reach the end of their lives through 2030, equating to a “potential loss of more than 32,000 scientist-days at sea per year.” In addition, the U.S.-funded JOIDES Resolution — a ship used to collect ocean sediment cores beneath the seafloor — finished its decades-long run in 2024 and left the future of scientific drilling in its wake.

Still, modern-day methods make the future look as bright as a sunrise on the horizon. For example, researchers can currently take advantage of solar-powered sailboats that function as data-driven drones. Such autonomous vehicles ride the waves to map shallow and deep sea environments, which contributes to the effort to map the entire ocean by 2030. Looking further ahead, several SMART systems — that’s Science Monitoring and Reliable Telecommunications — are in development all over the world, in an initiative spearheaded by a joint task force of United Nations organizations.

SMART seeks to outfit undersea telecommunications cables with sensors that can accumulate data on elements like temperature and ocean bottom pressure for up to 10 years or more. Once in place, these state-of-the-art systems could possibly keep tabs on deep-sea warming rates and better inform the ways climate change is affecting the ocean.

And don’t forget the limitless scientific uses of artificial intelligence, from identifying species via photo recognition and spotting coral bleaching from satellite imagery to training underwater robots for specific expeditions and processing acoustic recordings of marine mammals. Global Fishing Watch combines satellite data and AI pattern recognition to capture clear images of vessel activity, such as instances of industrial fishing and bottom trawling. AI also presents the possibility of lending a helping hand when making climate related decisions.

“Large language models right now are trained with words on the Internet, but what if they were trained with images and numbers and time series, and you could actually ask them some consequential questions, like ‘Where should we put our water treatment plant?’” said Özkan-Haller. “We did not feel that we, as a committee, had the expertise present to really talk about that at length, but I think there’s a lot of potential there that we need to explore and understand more.”

Observing the Ocean from Afar
Today, the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), an NSF-funded program opened in 2016,  produces publicly available remote ocean data via hundreds of instruments scattered across the global ocean. “We deploy sophisticated sensors in difficult locations and have been doing so for a substantial amount of time,” said Dr. James Edson, lead principal investigator of the OOI. “We need these really long time series to make sense of the impact of climate change on all of the global oceanic, seafloor, coastal, and ecosystem processes studied by our user community.”

OOI’s data — from imagery of phytoplankton to measurements of carbon dioxide — has been utilized in scientific studies for years. The initiative has embraced new technologies where possible but could better communicate its strengths going forward, in line with the committee’s conclusions. In addition, Edson listed details that were not included in the report’s representation of OOI.

“We just had four workshops this past year, attended by over 20 and up to 90 people at each workshop, on some of the new sensors that we have deployed,” he said. “We have been talking with NSF for years now about optimization of the OOI after 10 years of operation,” Edson added. “We are ready, willing, and able to improve the OOI based on the input from the user community.”

Observatories are becoming more and more prevalent. The Integrated Ocean Observing System, comprised of collaborators ranging from the local to federal level, serves as the nation’s “eyes on the ocean,” which includes a total of 1,081 regional and 731 national data collection platforms stationed within U.S. waters. Meanwhile, Argo instruments float with oceanic currents and spend their days underneath the surface documenting the biological and chemical features of marine environments the world over.

Advances in ocean science could even assist in disaster preparedness via essential data collection, especially as the Cascadia fault line presents a growing tsunami threat of historic proportions for the Pacific Northwest region. “A team from the University of Washington is using the cables and infrastructure from the OOI Regional Cabled Array to add additional sites on the seafloor along that Cascadia margin,” said Edson of the OOI.

Additionally, the U.S. might take a page from Japan’s book on monitoring the Nankai trench and install instruments within holes on the seafloor to discern smaller fault slip events beforehand. Closer to home, the Ocean Bottom Seismic Instrument Center plans this year to construct 35 additional broadband ocean bottom seismographs to record seismic wave activity happening in real time.

Fair Winds for the Future
Beyond its emphasis on technology, the report also calls for an increased amount of transdisciplinary collaboration among scientists and non-scientists alike, recognizing that both coastal communities and researchers contribute equal amounts of oceanic expertise. Research cruises for early-career scientists, fellowships for underserved populations, and degrees for business-oriented individuals can welcome a diverse array of people into the industry with open arms. Continued partnerships with other federal agencies and groups like the U.S. Coast Guard and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management could pave the way for efficient data sharing going forward.

Meanwhile, it’s important to remember that not all the technologies powering those data are ready to jump in the water with both feet. Levin cited environmental DNA — the genetic material organisms shed into water and sediment — as one example that demonstrates promise but needs verification and additional research for accurate interpretation in some settings, such as the deep sea. “Some studies have shown a mismatch between species composition in traditional physical samples versus eDNA samples,” she said.

As part of the Ocean DNA initiative, scientists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) aim to lead this field by conducting expeditions and curating a DNA library of the museum’s marine specimens. They’re beginning the ambitious endeavor by genetically sequencing U.S. fish species, of which over 90 percent can be found in the NMNH collections.

Whether it takes place in the lab or in the field, marine science now sets sail into the future with a dedicated crew from all walks of life at the helm. And so, there’s no telling what we will thank the ocean for when tomorrow comes. “Most people see a big, flat blue surface. It’s the same view looking out from any place on land or in the ocean. We don’t see what’s underneath,” said Levin. “New technologies that allow people to see what’s going on down there and in real time means we can inspire them — and often, it does.”