Scientists have a lot of questions about our planet’s most important carbon sink—and a new project could help answer them.
“The ocean provides this really critical climate regulation service to all of us, and yet we don't understand it as well as we could,” says Galen McKinley, a professor of environmental sciences at Columbia University and the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory and one of the lead scientists on the project.
“I'm just really excited to see how much this data can really pull together the community of people who are trying to understand and quantify the ocean carbon sink.” The world’s oceans are its largest carbon sinks, absorbing about a third of the CO2 we put into the atmosphere each year. One of the most important carbon sinks is the Southern Ocean, the body of water surrounding Antarctica. Despite being the second smallest of the world’s five oceans, the Southern Ocean is responsible for about 40 percent of all ocean-based carbon dioxide absorption. Scientists, however, know surprisingly little about why, exactly, the Southern Ocean is such a successful carbon sink. What’s more, climate models that successfully predict ocean carbon absorption elsewhere in the world have diverged significantly when it comes to the Southern Ocean. One of the biggest issues with understanding more about what’s going on in the Southern Ocean is simply a lack of data. This is thanks in part to the extreme conditions in the region. The Drake Passage, which runs between South America and Argentina, is one of the toughest stretches of ocean for ships, due to incredibly strong currents around Antarctica and dangerous winds; it’s even rougher in the winter months. The ocean also has a particularly pronounced cloud cover, Crisp says, which makes satellite observations difficult. “The Southern Ocean is really far away, so we just haven’t done a lot of science there,” says McKinley. “It is a very big ocean, and it is this dramatic and scary place to go.” A large amount of the data we have on ocean carbon cycles is not collected by scientific research crews, but by commercial shipping vessels running their usual routes. These ships run autonomous data collection as they travel, which provides a valuable source of information about the world’s oceans. This information, however, is geographically constrained to shipping routes; it’s a tough sell to convince a container ship to stray from a familiar course just to collect scientific data, especially in an ocean as rough as the Southern Ocean. These data gaps are where uncrewed surface vessels—dubbed USVs—come in. The four USVs that will be deployed over the five-year course of the Schmidt Sciences-funded project can go outside the bounds of the usual shipping routes, collecting data on areas which would be nearly impossible to reach with crewed vessels. The drones will run continuously over the course of five years, piloted remotely, collecting valuable data even during the winter. Their collection method, McKinley says, will also take more sophisticated measurements of the partial pressure of CO2 in the water—data that will give valuable insight into the carbon cycle process—than other projects that have put unmanned buoys or floats into the ocean. The project will use machine learning, McKinley says, to direct the USVs where to go in order to maximize data collection, adjusting the routes to get the best results. Data collected by the USVs will be made available to the public. The project’s focus on data collection in the winter months is especially valuable for understanding the carbon cycle in the Southern Ocean, says Eileen Hofmann, a professor of ocean and earth sciences at Old Dominion University. But, she says, there are so many questions about how the carbon cycle works in the Southern Ocean that “anything would be helpful to add to the data collection.” This project, Hofmann said, seems “pretty cool.” The funding structure of this project is set up as a public-private partnership: Money from Schmidt Sciences will buy collected data from the companies that own and operate the USVs, which, in turn, are contracted out through NOAA. NOAA has been testing out public-private partnerships using USV companies for a few years now, including sending USVs to travel into hurricanes this summer to collect data. Federal funding for scientific research, especially around climate change, has been a central target for cuts from the Trump administration. The presidential 2026 budget, released in May, aims to slash NOAA’s spending by 30 percent; Democratic lawmakers attempting to defend the agency in Congress fear that a long shutdown could further starve the agency. Meanwhile, the National Science Foundation’s budget would be cut by 57 percent under the presidential plan. The NSF’s Office of Polar Programs, which supports funding for other research into the Southern Ocean’s carbon cycle, laid off several program directors in February as part of wider cuts across the federal government. NSF cuts have also recently forced a long-standing Arctic research center to close. Other types of climate research and data collection have been attacked across agencies, including shuttering a long-running program collecting emissions data at EPA. The carbon cycle projects Schmidt Sciences is funding, which also include projects in the Congo Basin and research on land-based carbon budgets, were pitched before the administration changeover. Skrivanek says that the organization has no plans to change its program focus, and that it is “fundamentally motivated to advance basic research and research that is interdisciplinary,” as well as international projects. However, scientists say that outside funding is becoming more crucial to ambitious projects as the US government scientific funding apparatus—one of the biggest drivers of research and development in the world—falls apart. “The funding cuts on the federal level are putting more emphasis on looking for this type of funding,” says Hofmann.
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