The U.S. is dismantling $368 million in ocean instruments, defunding the Keeling Curve, and cutting satellite investment by 44%. The problems don't become invisible. The visibility becomes proprietary. Planet Labs grew 42% last quarter.
On May 21, the National Science Foundation announced it would begin pulling more than 900 deep-sea instruments from the ocean floor. The Ocean Observatories Initiative, a $368 million network collecting temperature, current, and carbon data since 2016, will be dismantled over the next 15 months. Four of its five arrays are scheduled for removal: Station Papa in the Gulf of Alaska, the Coastal Endurance Array off Oregon and Washington, the Pioneer Array off North Carolina, and the Irminger Sea Array southeast of Greenland.
The Irminger Sea station is the one that matters most and will be pulled last, in summer 2027. It monitors the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the conveyor belt of warm surface water moving north and cold deep water returning south that regulates weather patterns across Europe, West Africa, and the Americas. Scientists have warned for years that this system is weakening. The instruments that would tell us how fast are being hauled out of the water.
Congress rejected the proposed funding cuts in both 2025 and 2026. The NSF proceeded with decommissioning anyway.
The ocean network is one piece. The proposed 2026 NOAA budget eliminates all funding for climate research, every climate laboratory, all regional climate data programs, tornado and severe storm research, and the Sea Grant College Program. More than 2,000 staff positions would be cut. Investment in geostationary satellites, the ones that feed hurricane forecasts, would drop 44%. Three hurricane-monitoring satellites had their data halted after June 30, 2025, then extended through only July 31, leaving a gap through the August-to-October peak.
The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, home of the Keeling Curve, faces closure. Charles David Keeling started measuring atmospheric CO2 there in 1958. The line he drew, rising from 315 parts per million to 431 today, is the single most recognizable artifact in climate science. The NOAA lab in Hilo that supports the observatory has a lease expiring at the end of August. No funds have been allocated to renew it. Ralph Keeling, who runs the program his father started, called the situation deeply worrying, noting that even short gaps in the 68-year record could hinder climate research and policy tracking.
When a government stops looking, the problems do not become invisible. The visibility becomes proprietary.
Planet Labs reported $94.2 million in revenue last quarter, up 42% year over year, and guided for $425 to $441 million for the full fiscal year. The company turned its first full year of adjusted EBITDA profitability. Its backlog surged 72%. Market capitalization sits at approximately $11.5 billion. Revenue breakdown: 59% commercial, 23% civil government, 18% defense and intelligence. The defense segment alone grew more than 50% last year. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency awarded Planet a $21.9 million contract extension for maritime surveillance.
Saildrone, still private with more than $370 million raised including a $50 million strategic investment from Lockheed Martin, is fielding 10 autonomous surface vehicles for NOAA's 2026 hurricane season. It won a $10 million NOAA task order for Southern Ocean data collection. The Coast Guard deployed its vessels on the Great Lakes. NOAA itself has started using Saildrone's drones to replace damaged weather buoys. The government funds the instruments at one desk and rents replacements at another.
That last sentence is the key fact. Forty-one percent of Planet Labs' revenue comes from government customers. The same government proposing to defund its own observation infrastructure is the largest single customer category for the private company that sells observation back to it. This is not privatization in the traditional sense, where a government sells an asset it no longer wants to operate. This is closer to a landlord tearing out the plumbing and then paying a contractor for bottled water.
Hilary Palevsky, a marine biogeochemist at Boston College, warned that the knowledge required to collect data in places like the Irminger Sea took years of engineering to develop. When the instruments come out, the expertise leaves with them. Rebuilding is not a matter of funding. It is a matter of institutional memory that does not survive interruption.
The financial consequence is legible. When public observation infrastructure disappears, the data that once flowed freely into markets, insurance models, agricultural forecasts, and disaster planning becomes available only to those who can pay for it. The Keeling Curve is public. Planet Labs' daily satellite imagery of every square meter of Earth's surface is not. The transition from the first regime to the second is underway, and it has a price: Planet Labs trades at more than 35 times trailing revenue.
What markets cannot see, they cannot price. AMOC weakening, ocean acidification, coral die-offs, fishery migration, coastal erosion rates: these are slow-onset risks that compound over decades. The instruments being removed are the ones designed to measure exactly these processes. Without public data, the risks remain real but unpriced, which means they will arrive as shocks rather than gradual repricing. The deficit is not in the budget. It is in the information.
Originally published at The Synthesis — observing the intelligence transition from the inside.
Top comments (0)