$15 Million Bet on Ocean Blindspots: Scripps to Monitor Depths Never Watched Before

The deep ocean warms faster than climate models predicted. Scientists have known this for years, but they have been working mostly blind - the global array of ocean-monitoring robots that transformed oceanography two decades ago reaches only to 2,000 meters, leaving the bottom two-thirds of the water column essentially unwatched. A $15 million grant to Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, announced this week, aims to close that gap.

Robots to the abyss

The centerpiece of the new funding is an expansion of the Argo network - a fleet of roughly 4,000 autonomous floats that drift with ocean currents, periodically diving to measure temperature, salinity, and pressure before surfacing to transmit their data by satellite. Standard Argo floats profile to 2,000 meters. Newer Deep Argo instruments can reach 6,000 meters, sampling the full water column.

The grant will pay for approximately 50 Deep Argo floats, deployed by Scripps, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, with NOAA handling ongoing data management. Priority goes to regions with little or no current coverage - places where the ocean's behavior has been inferred rather than measured.

The timing is significant. Sarah Purkey, a physical oceanographer at Scripps, notes that deep-sea warming over the last two decades has outpaced what models foresaw. Without direct measurements, the feedback loops that drive sea-level rise and global heat distribution remain poorly constrained. More floats in more places means better data for the climate simulations that policy depends on.

Reading the ocean's DNA

A second strand of the work involves environmental DNA - fragments of genetic material shed by every organism that passes through a body of water. The approach has transformed freshwater ecology; applied to the open ocean and polar seas, it could reveal which microbes live in which water masses, how those communities vary with depth and latitude, and how they are shifting as conditions change.

Margaret Leinen, Scripps Director Emerita, will lead this effort, building on her work with the Ocean Biomolecular Observing Network. Recent Scripps research using similar techniques found that different deep ocean water masses harbor distinct microbial ecosystems - a result that underscores how much of the ocean's biological structure remains undocumented. Researchers will use both autonomous water samplers and conventional collection to build baseline datasets across regions that have rarely been visited.

"In many regions, we know very little about the microbial communities that form the base of the ocean food web," Leinen said. "Without data, we can't predict how these communities are going to respond to climate change or what the consequences might be."

Beneath the Doomsday Glacier

The third and most technically audacious component targets Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica - the one scientists sometimes call the Doomsday Glacier because it holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by roughly two feet if it collapses entirely. Previous Scripps expeditions, led by scientist Jamin Greenbaum, found unexpectedly warm water beneath the glacier's floating ice shelf, accelerating melt from below. The new funding supports a device called RIFT-OX - short for Recoverable Ice Fracture Ocean Explorer - designed to descend through natural cracks in the ice and collect water samples directly from beneath the glacier's tongue.

RIFT-OX is lowered by helicopter into rifts in the ice shelf, then uses an onboard winch to lower its instrument package through the water column below. This season's Antarctic fieldwork, supported in part by the Korea Polar Research Institute through berths on the icebreaker R/V Araon, will test whether the data collected can clarify what is driving Thwaites' rapid retreat - information that could sharpen projections of how fast sea levels will rise over the coming century.

Where the money comes from

The grant comes from the Fund for Science and Technology (FFST), a new private foundation established through the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen. Launched in 2025 with a commitment to invest at least $500 million over four years, FFST describes its focus as transformative science in bioscience, environmental research, and AI for good. For Scripps, this is the largest single external gift since the institution joined UC San Diego in 1960.

"The ocean holds answers to some of the most pressing questions about our planet's future, but only if we can observe it," said Meenakshi Wadhwa, Scripps director and UC San Diego vice chancellor for marine sciences. The observation network the grant builds will be, in some respects, a down payment on answers that have been out of reach for decades.