Priorities for ocean science over next decade: Sea-level rise, geohazards
The eight priority science questions that emerged from this process are:
- What are the rates, mechanisms, impacts, and geographic variability of sea-level change?
- How are the coastal and estuarine ocean and their ecosystems influenced by the global hydrologic cycle, land use, and upwelling from the deep ocean?
- How have ocean biogeochemical and physical processes contributed to today’s climate and its variability, and how will this system change over the next century?
- What is the role of biodiversity in the resilience of marine ecosystems and how will it be affected by natural and anthropogenic changes?
- How different will marine food webs be at mid-century? In the next 100 years?
- What are the processes that control the formation and evolution of ocean basins?
- How can we better characterize risk and improve the ability to forecast geohazards like mega-earthquakes, tsunamis, undersea landslides, and volcanic eruptions?
- What is the geophysical, chemical, and biological character of the subseafloor environment and how does it affect global elemental cycles and understanding of the origin and evolution of life?
Because achieving many of these decadal priorities will require research across the disciplines of ocean science, it is important that the ocean science community not encounter barriers to obtaining funding for interdisciplinary research, the report says. And because these questions have broad relevance to societal issues, other federal agencies may also be interested in devoting resources to these questions; collaboration among agencies could hasten advances.
Rebalancing funding
From 2000 to 2014, OCE’s annual budgets have not kept pace with the rising costs of operating and maintaining research infrastructure, including the fleet of academic research vessels, scientific ocean drilling facilities, and the Ocean Observatories Initiative. As a consequence, the increase in infrastructure costs has led to a substantial decline in funding for core research programs and therefore less support for investigators.
Without a budget increase, the only way to restore funding for core science is to reduce the amount of money spent on infrastructure, the report says. If budgets remain flat or have only inflationary increases, OCE should adjust its major infrastructure programs to comprise no more than 40 percent to 50 percent of its total annual program budget, the report says. To implement this, OCE should initiate an immediate 10 percent reduction in major infrastructure costs in their next budget, followed by an additional 10 percent to 20 percent decrease over the following five years.
Cost savings should be applied directly to strengthening core science programs, investing in technology development, and funding partnerships to address the decadal science priorities, the report says. “Reductions in infrastructure support are never easy and will cause disruptions for parts of the ocean science community,” said committee co-chair David Titley, professor of practice in meteorology and director of Penn State’s Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk. “But restoring a balance between the core science budget and infrastructure and then investing prudently in new technology will enable a diverse community of scientists to undertake research and pursue discoveries that will advance ocean science.”
The report urges continued involvement of the scientific community in setting goals and objectives moving forward. And it encourages OCE to expand its partnerships with other agencies, international programs, and other sectors since these partnerships can maximize the value of research and infrastructure investments.
The study was sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
— Read more in Sea Change: 2015-2025 Decadal Survey of Ocean Sciences (National Academies Press, 2015)
