Shaping thriving ocean futures

Advancing healthy coastal communities and marine systems through knowledge, partnerships and innovation.

The College of Global Futures proudly announces the launch of its fourth school, which advances learning, discovery and partnerships that shape a thriving global future – the School of Ocean Futures.

The School of Ocean Futures focuses on the current and future states of the ocean, while also addressing the challenges our oceans experience due to increasing pressure from human activities. It combines research and teaching facilities in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans with cutting-edge research facilities housed within the Rob and Melani Walton Center for Planetary Health on ASU’s Tempe campus. These will provide students with a wide array of experiential learning opportunities that will prepare them to conduct work of significant impact.

Arizona

The School of Ocean Futures is based within ASU’s newest research and learning center, the Rob and Melani Walton Center for Planetary Health. This building is home to the College of Global Futures, as well as the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. The Walton Center holds more than 70,000 square feet of laboratory space and countless collaborative environments to encourage transdisciplinary learning and exploration. Its landscape includes a functioning canal spur that dates to the Akimel O’Odham and the Piipaash people who cultivated this land more than 2,000 years ago.

Bermuda

Headquartered at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, ASU’s Atlantic research and learning presence is rooted at an institution with more than 120 years of excellence in ocean science and research. Commonly known as BIOS, this facility houses a comprehensive campus of classrooms, laboratories, dormitories and vessels that allow scientists and scholars to venture into the surrounding Sargasso Sea, one of the world’s most diverse open-ocean ecosystems including the world’s most northern coral reefs. BIOS is home to the longest-running time-series on seawater chemistry, biology and physics (the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study), as well as the longest record of ocean sediment-trap studies in the world, the Oceanic Flux Program.

Hawai’i

With facilities on the Big Island that are administered by the U.S. Forest Service, the Hilo location is home to ASU’s Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science and houses computational and chemical labs, offices, conference rooms and field operations space. Hawaiʻi is also home to the ASU Coral Atlas Laboratory, a network of field sites and land-based partners linking research and outreach to map the world’s coral reefs, and the Pacific RISA program (Honolulu) that supports Pacific island and coastal communities in adapting to the impacts of climate change.