Neither a volcanic eruption nor the draconian budget cuts imposed by the Washington administration were enough to bring it down. The Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, which since 1958 has been monitoring global data on the concentration of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere, will be able to continue its work. The site is once again accessible, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), which manages it, has confirmed that the project has been refinanced and will even undergo a major expansion.

Trump had announced funding cuts and the termination of the lease agreement

The news was first reported by the ecologist portal We Don't Have Time and picked up by the American outlet forbes, which recalls how just last spring the worst had been feared for a research centre considered fundamental to global climate monitoring. "As part of a cost-containment drive, the government had decided to terminate the lease on the federal office located behind the observatory, which produced the Keeling Curve and a body of scientific data among the most significant humanity has ever produced. Now Noaa is announcing that the very same site will not only reopen, but will be rebuilt and expanded."

We Don't Have Time @WeDontHaveTime

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Mauna Loa Observatory Survives Lava, Budget Cuts & Politics 🙌
After a volcanic eruption & funding threats, NOAA says Mauna Loa's world-famous CO2 record is secure, accessible again, & undergoing major upgrades.

Read more on @forbes
forbes.com/sites/we-dont-…
#MakeScienceGreatAgain

♥ 5 2 giu 2026 · Apri su X →

We Don't Have Time contacted the American agency directly to understand how a research centre that just a year ago was given up for lost could now not only return to operation but even be expanded. Noaa responded by explaining that, had the site actually been shut down, scientists could have measured CO2 elsewhere. What they could not have recreated, however, "is precisely what makes Mauna Loa irreplaceable: an unbroken thread connecting nearly seventy years of climatological research."

"Closing Mauna Loa would be like France closing the Louvre"

"Mauna Loa is a historic, pioneering site," commented to the ecologist daily Reporterre, at the time the budget cuts were announced, Robert Vautard, co-chair of Working Group 1 of the Ipcc, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "It is the place that brought to light the growth in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It would be like France stopping funding the Louvre."

We Don't Have Time commented on the news by explaining that "the Keeling Curve doesn't care about politics. The institutions that protect it do. This time, scientists raised their voices, journalists reported the story, legislators acted and citizens paid attention. No one can say exactly how much weight each individual action carried. But we know that one of the most important scientific datasets in the world has survived, and today its future looks far brighter than it did a year ago. The deepest lesson from the Mauna Loa observatory is that important scientific infrastructure does not protect itself. It survives when people care enough to defend it."

Meanwhile Trump moves to dismantle a $368 million ocean observation system

Despite this good news, it was immediately offset by a new decision from Donald Trump. According to a report in the New York Times, the Washington administration is dismantling a deep-ocean observation system worth 368 million dollars, established ten years ago to monitor coastal areas, marine ecosystems and the currents that influence the global climate.

The government agency National Science Foundation has announced that in the coming weeks it will dispatch vessels to begin removing more than 900 measuring instruments anchored off the coasts of Oregon, Washington state, Alaska, North Carolina and in the Irminger Sea between Greenland and Iceland.

Among the infrastructure to be decommissioned, some instruments are used to understand how the ocean absorbs a portion of the CO2 released into Earth's atmosphere by human activities. Others monitor marine heatwaves and help scientists understand how these may affect fisheries. And this time it will also be far harder to mount another battle to save the research from the White House's anti-science crusade, given that the new measure is already being carried out.