Kate Moran is a Canadian ocean engineer who is concerned with the changes to climate data collection and availability in the United States.
In a conversation with two colleagues on Canada’s east coast the three scientists were discussing how “the US National Science Foundation (NSF), under the Trump administration, had just announced a plan to dismantle and remove infrastructure collecting key climate data in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.”
“Within moments, Moran was already thinking through an elaborate plan for a Canadian response that included reshuffling funds and securing resources to operate unimaginably expensive and hard-to-access ocean moorings and data-collecting arrays. “I was asking, ‘Could I reprogram some of the money?’ We would have to prioritize and not do some of our stuff, but some of these sites are critically important,“ she said in an interview with Canada’s National Observer.
Over time scientists have begun to recognize that “many of the world's most important discoveries depend on decades of continuous data collection accomplished by international infrastructure and global networks of researchers — work that depends on stable, long-term support.” As the “Trump administration slashes funding for federal science programs in the US, the effects are reverberating through laboratories, research vessels and observing systems across the globe. In each case, it has been unclear who could fill the gap for the giant collaborative projects that no single country can take on alone. But researchers in Canada, Europe and elsewhere are stepping up, recognizing that protecting international collaborations and data continuity is essential for current and future research. They must now act not simply as investigators, but as organizers, diplomats and resilient leaders working to preserve a global scientific enterprise.”
Moran’s story is a fascinating one beginning with being “one of only 58 women in her undergraduate civil engineering program of 1,270.” She was in high school when the first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970 and she took the message to heart and began riding her bike to and from school each day. But in 1972 Hurricane Agnes “hit her hometown, destroying her school, her home and everything her family owned. She wondered if science and better weather forecasting could help families, like hers, in future destructive storms.”
Fast forward a number of years to when armed with an undergraduate engineering degree she started an Ocean Engineering graduate program at the University of Rhode Island, where, despite spending her first ocean outing vomiting over the side of a boat, she fell in love with ocean research.
Moran, who started off as an American but is now a Canadian citizen, saw clearly the upcoming threat posed to science by the Trump administration and this “immediately kicked her into problem-solving mode. It was immediately apparent that Canadian and other international scientists could and must step in. They began making calls, lobbying politicians and galvanizing teams to push back, all while simultaneously sourcing options for infrastructure replacement and thinking creatively about how to ensure data continuity.”
“The pressure campaign worked. On June 18, 2026, the National Science Foundation announced a reversal of the plans to dismantle OOI. “Effective immediately, NSF will not proceed with further removal or descoping of equipment from the remaining arrays and will continue operations,” the NSF wrote. NSF is now developing plans to continue operations and redeploy the equipment after planned servicing and maintenance.”
In closing Moran told Canada's National Observer:
“We have to defend the science that we do. We have to grow it. We have to fill those gaps. I see the international science community as being the most important diplomats on the planet right now,” she said.
“It is worth the fight. And we need to fight more.”