American dominance of the sea will fade, slowly, as our wealth has been squandered and our leaders’ willingness to invest in the future evaporates:

US Navy welcomes two ships into research fleet

US oceanographers this week received a welcome boost when the US Navy announced it had finalized contracts for the construction of two 73-metre research vessels. Set to launch in 2014 and 2015, the two vessels, costing around $145 million, will replace members of the existing fleet. But despite the good news, many researchers are concerned that other ageing vessels in the fleet won’t get replaced.

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It has taken more than ten years of planning and negotiating to reach the construction phase for the ships. The Navy was originally going to build four vessels, but budget cuts in 2009 reduced that number to two: AGOR 27 and AGOR 28, as they will be known until they are given proper names.

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The more efficient engines on the new ships are especially important because rising fuel costs, combined with relatively flat research funding, have significantly cut the number of days researchers are able to go to sea each year. “There is a lot more science that needs to be done” than there is ship time available to do it, says Appelgate.

The funding problems extend to securing new vessels for the research fleet. Researchers began pushing in 1973 for a global-range ship with a hull that can withstand ice so that they could do polar operations. But it took the 2009 stimulus funding introduced by President Barack Obama to make the money available for the National Science Foundation’s 80-metre R/V Sikuliaq, which is scheduled to hit the water this summer.

Funding difficulties have also led to plans to decommission ships sooner than planned, and keep others in port (see US academic fleet cuts operations as budget bites), and the National Science Foundation has delayed plans to build three regional-class vessels in the 45-metre range.

Beyond these three potential vessels, there are no plans for additional new ships, says Clare Reimers, a chemical oceanographer at Oregon State University in Corvallis and chairwoman of the UNOLS Fleet Improvement Committee, who is concerned about the long-term implications as it can take more than a decade to plan, fund and build a ship. “When we reach, say, 2025 or 2030, we’re certainly going to have lost capacity that we have no plans to replace,” she says.

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