The development, reported Monday by the New York Times, is the latest setback to environmental and climate research, already undermined by budget cuts implemented since Trump began his second term in office in January 2025.

More than 900 deep-sea instruments anchored near the US Atlantic and Pacific coasts and in the Irminger Sea between Greenland and Iceland will be removed starting this month, the Times report said.

The devices are part of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a program primarily funded by the federal government.

"As many of you may now be aware, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) has initiated a major descoping of the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Major Facility," Jim Edson, its lead scientist, said in a note to researchers in May, seen by AFP.

The process of removing underwater infrastructure at four of five active observation stations is expected to last 15 months and has already started at a location off the northwest US coast, Edson's note said.

The decision to sharply scale back the system was communicated to project teams in early May, an NSF spokesperson told AFP.

It "aligns with NSF's wider strategy of a nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies," the spokesperson said.

The $368-million deep ocean observation system began operating in 2016 and was projected to continue collecting data for 25 years, the New York Times report said.

That data has been used by researchers to study how the ocean absorbs greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, the effects of marine heatwaves on fisheries, and how ocean currents influence weather.