“Without international cooperation, things would fall apart,” Ants Leetmaa told me recently, referring to the joint efforts of the U.S., Japan, Korea, and others in developing and maintaining the TOGA TAO Array. The extent to which international cooperation benefits us is not always obvious nor is how it works. There is an untold number of acronyms, groups, and programs, which sometimes overlap in purpose, providing healthy competition at best, redundancy at worst.

Cole, M. 1995. Multinational oceanographic cooperation. Oceanography 8(3):112–113, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.1995.14.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.