The top priorities of the US ocean sciences community through 2035 are a continued investment in basic, curiosity-driven research and a unified effort to improve ocean forecasts to meet national and global environmental challenges. Those and other recommendations are detailed in Forecasting the Ocean: The 2025–2035 Decade of Ocean Science, a survey of the field that was conducted over 18 months by a committee of US researchers.
The US “is at a critical juncture,” the committee writes in its report, which was released in February. The NSF research budget in ocean sciences has not kept pace with inflation, according to data provided to Physics Today by the committee. Additionally, the country’s ocean research fleet is shrinking, and the country has lost its only deep-sea scientific drilling vessel, says the report. Investment decisions could either revitalize the discipline or drive US ocean scientists to labs overseas, says report co-chair Tuba...
