The world relies on a modest number of countries to keep watch over the ocean. That arrangement is starting to fail. Europe and Asia must now decide whether to let the system unravel, or to take it up together. Right now, in every ocean basin on Earth, a global network of instruments measures the state of the sea. Research ships steam along oceanographic transects from surface to seafloor. Anchored buoys watch the tropical oceans for the first signs of El Niño or tropical cyclones and take the p