Updated at 3:15 p.m. on February 28, 2025
Field research in Antarctica is an extended endurance exercise. The approval of subsidies alone can take more than a year, long enough to grow a beard like one of the shipwreck survivors of Ernest Shackleton. Military freight planes transporting researchers from New Zealand to McMurdo, the largest American coastal base on the continent, regularly go back halfway in bad weather. In McMurdo, scientists sometimes expect weeks for a safe flight in the frozen interior. They land on summary and unlikely tracks and camp directly on the ice cap. Scientific instruments are sometimes accompanied and decompose in the extreme cold, just like human bodies. Just when it all starts to work, a thug storm can roll on the horizon. If things take place on the side, a rescue flight could be in a week.
President Donald Trump has just made this work even more difficult. Last week, his administration launched a series of rude layoffs at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Federal Agency which finances and supports all research on the American field in Antarctica. The team of programs that exceed this research at the conclusion was already in digital disadvantage, and now it is not a single member of permanent full -time staff. The approval of the new research proposals will slow down considerably and, in the coming years, the number of research carried out each season on the field could be seriously reduced. As long as anyone knows it, these layoffs were not deliberately designed to derail the American research in Antarctica. But they are nevertheless part of a more important dismantling of climate science through the federal government. Whether by pure negligence or in the pursuit of his belief declared that climate change is a “hoax”, Trump sabotes this science when it is more crucial than ever for the human future.
The United States has long been the most extensive basic and aircraft system in Antarctica. The NSF has an unrivaled record to safely place researchers in the most prohibited environments on the continent, not only for intellectual activities. They are on urgent cases, trying to discover how speed the antarctic ice caps will collapse and blend into the ocean, increasing the sea level high enough to drown the coastal cities of the world. These scientists puncture deep holes through the mile thickly ice to see what is happening at the base of a glacier. They send submersibles in the crucial area under the ice shelves, where lukewarm water eats to frozen support structures which prevent glaciers from sliding more quickly into the sea. They measure the loss of annual ice on the Antarctic, which is directly in correlation with the elevation of the sea level in the world. They put all this data in its context by shooting on ice hearts which give us a return to a million years on the climate of the continent.
Despite the importation of civilization of this work, in recent years, research in Antarctic has had trouble. At full power, the NSF Antarctic Sciences section is supposed to have around nine full -time program directors who keep the search machine in the field. These administrators assess research proposals. They bring together expert panels to see them again. They go to Antarctica to support the work in the field they approve. Even before Trump takes up his duties, funding constraints and a long mouth of pandemic wood slowed polar research. The field work was regularly reduced in the scope or postponed, sometimes for years. The C-130 fleet which transports scientists to the posts had started to age. The agency demolished a dormitory in McMurdo years ago and still has not rebuilt it. In December 2024, only four full -time permanent program directors, more part -time, were in place for the Antarctic sciences.
Of these four, three were in their period of probation, for one reason or another, which makes them vulnerable to the order of the Trump administration which exercises probationary federal employees. These layoffs were not made with great grace. At 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, David Porter, program director, received a disturbing email asking for his presence at a zoom meeting. The meeting was a mess, said wearing. The agency staff had sent a defective zoom link and, at some point, was accidentally made a host. The director of the NSF, Sethuraman Panchanathan, was visibly absent. (The NSF did not respond to a request for comments on the absence of Panchanathan. In a statement sent by email, a spokesperson for the NSF acknowledges that the organization had dismissed 170 employees and said: “We thank these employees for their service in NSF and their contributions to advance the mission of the agency. New Zealand. Its flight to the United States has made an unforeseen anter had to connect to the meeting from your hotel room before dawn, with emerging and anxious eyes.
Only one permanent full-time program director remains, as well as some part-time and the staff who turn from the academic world. Nothing indicates that the agency will be able to hire more. The remaining members of this patchwork team will have to continue working on their own arrears. They will take care of the proposals of licensed administrators and half -finished projects if and when they can. Porter told me that in the last hours during which he could access his email, he contacted researchers whose projects he supported. “All I could tell them was:” Hey, you’re not going to hear from me anymore, but good luck. “”
The polar research community is pessimistic about the chances of recovery. Ted Scambos, glaciologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, fears that the financing cuts will follow the loss of program directors. “There are a few senators who are champions of this kind of thing, but in this budget cut environment, they will have many other priorities to protect,” he told me. Sridhar Anandakrishnan, a glaciologist at Penn State, told me that he was worried that the global prestige of American polar science programs will suffer. The work of this type requires permanent infrastructure that only rich countries can build. The NSF recently sought to compensate for its various problems by relying on international partnerships, but other countries may not be so interested in them in the future, said Anandakrishnan. “They may wonder if the NSF even has the bandwidth, or if you can still trust as a partner.”
Trump has always retreated from the international character of climate science, and since his return to the White House, he has sought to hinder his global institutions. During his first day in power, he withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement. He then prohibited US government scientists from working on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On the national level, Trump has frozen all NSF subsidies, including those that finance climate science. A court has since interrupted the application of this order, but certain transfers of money would always be sustain. An expected atmosphere has seized the whole field while the Congress negotiates a new federal budget: some higher education programs have taken an admissions break and universities have instituted hiring gels. The Trump administration has would have proposed a reduction in the 30% budget to the national oceanic and atmospheric administration, one of the most complete sources of climatic data in the world. Mass layoffs at the NOAA have would have already started. The administration did many of these things during the hottest of the planet ever recorded.
Climate change is a global problem, and its effects are better studied closely wherever they occur, but especially in Antarctica. Over 80% of the planet’s ice is at the top of its surface. Scientists recently focused on the glacial cap of Western Antarctica because it historically seemed more unstable. If and when it slips into the ocean, sea level could increase up to 10 feet, erasing the islands and flooding cities which are near the shores of the world, where more than 40% of all people live. Anandakrishnan told me that he and his colleagues now suspected that the glacial caps of Eastern Antarctica could also be unstable. It will take work to discover how trembling they are and if something can be done to Keep them in place.
Trump will almost certainly bequeath a warmer land at the next administration. The last five American presidents have each done the same. What makes Trump different is his insistence to disturb the basic apparatus of climate science, the effort to understand how much the planet will one day become and how much its seas will increase. Warm warming for future generations is a crime, but it is concealment.