On April 1, 1946, a magnitude 8.6 earthquake struck near Alaska’s Aleutian Islands , triggering a tsunami that barreled across the Pacific and killed 159 people on the island of Hawaii. In the aftermath of this catastrophe, the U.S. tsunami warning system was born.

Nearly 80 years later, this life-saving network of seismic and sea-level monitoring stations is crumbling. Overseen by NOAA, the stations rely on federal funding that the Trump administration slashed this year. As a result, nine seismic stations operated by the Alaska Earthquake Center will shut down in mid-November, Alaska’s News Source reports .

These stations gather critical data on the shape and magnitude of earthquakes along one of the world’s most seismically active regions: the Alaskan-Aleutian Subduction Zone. Th

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