WASHINGTON, June 14 -- The Trump administration is pulling the country's deep-ocean eyes out of the water, one anchored sensor at a time. Through cuts at the National Science Foundation, it is dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a network of roughly nine hundred instruments built over more than a decade at a cost of about $368 million to watch the parts of the ocean that matter most to the climate. The first pieces are already coming up. A research buoy off the Oregon coast is being hauled from the Pacific this month, and the rest of the array is set to follow over the next year, until the system that has streamed real-time ocean data since 2016 goes dark.

What is being switched off is not a luxury. As CNN reported, the moore...