Field research in Antarctica is an extended exercise in endurance. Grant approval alone can take more than a year, long enough to grow a beard like one of Ernest Shackleton’s shipwreck survivors. The military cargo planes that carry researchers from New Zealand to McMurdo, America’s largest coastal base on the continent, regularly turn back halfway in bad weather. At McMurdo, scientists sometimes wait for weeks for a safe flight into the frozen interior. They land on sketchy, unimproved runways and make camp right on the ice sheet. Scientific instruments occasionally glitch and break down in the extreme cold, and so do human bodies. Just when everything finally starts working, a rogue storm may roll over the horizon. If things go sideways, a rescue flight might be a week away.
President Donald Trump has just made this work even more difficult. Last week, his administration initiated a round of coarse-grained layoffs at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the federal agency that funds and supports all American field research in Antarctica. The team of program directors that shepherds this research to fruition was already shorthanded, and now it’s down to just one permanent full-time staffer. The approval of new research proposals will slow considerably, and in the coming years, the amount of research conducted each field season could be severely reduced. As far as anyone knows, these firings were not deliberately designed to derail American research in Antarctica. But they are nonetheless part of a larger dismantling of climate science across the federal government. Whether through sheer carelessness or in pursuit of his stated belief that climate change is a “hoax,” Trump is sabotaging this science when it is more crucial than ever to the human future.
The U.S. has long had the most extensive system of bases and aircraft in Antarctica. The NSF has an unmatched record of safely placing researchers in the continent’s most forbidding environments, and not just for intellectual pursuits. They are on urgent business, trying to find out just how quickly Antarctica’s ice sheets will crumble and melt into the ocean, raising sea levels high enough to drown coastal cities worldwide. These scientists drill deep holes through the mile-thick ice to see what’s happening at a glacier’s base. They send submersibles into the crucial zone underneath ice shelves, where warm water eats away at the frozen support structures that stop glaciers from sliding faster into the sea. They measure the annual ice loss on Antarctica, which directly correlates with sea-level rise worldwide. They put all these data in context by pulling up cores of ice that give us a million-year look back at the continent’s climate.
Despite the civilizational import of this work, in recent years, Antarctic research has struggled. At full strength, the NSF’s Antarctic Sciences Section is supposed to have approximately nine full-time program directors keeping the field research machine running. These directors evaluate research proposals. They assemble expert panels to review them. They go to Antarctica to support the fieldwork that they approve. Even before Trump took office, funding constraints and a long pandemic hangover had slowed polar research. Fieldwork was regularly being reduced in scope or postponed, sometimes for years. The fleet of C-130s that carry scientists to the poles had started to age badly. The agency demolished a dorm at McMurdo years ago, and still hasn’t rebuilt it. In December 2024, only four full-time permanent program directors, plus one part-timer, were in place for Antarctic science.
Of those four, three were in their probationary period, for one reason or another, making them vulnerable to the Trump administration’s order laying off probationary federal employees. These firings weren’t carried out with a great deal of grace. At 9:30 a.m. last Tuesday, David Porter, a program director, received an ominous email requesting his presence at a Zoom meeting. The meeting was a mess, Porter said. The agency’s staff had sent out a faulty Zoom link, and at one point, Porter was accidentally made a host. The director of the NSF, Sethuraman Panchanathan, was conspicuously absent. (The NSF did not respond to a request for comment.) Kelly Brunt, another program director, received word about the meeting while she was still on her way home from Antarctica after dropping off her big red NSF-issue parka in New Zealand. Her flight to the U.S. made an unplanned landing on the way, and she had to log on to the meeting from her hotel room before dawn, bleary-eyed and anxious. “Right away, we were told that we would be terminated by the end of the day,” she told me.
Now only one full-time permanent program director remains, along with a few part-timers and staff that rotate in from academia. There is no indication that the agency will be able to hire more. The remaining members of this patchwork crew will have to keep working through their own backlogs. They’ll attend to the laid-off directors’ proposals and half-finished projects if and when they can. Porter told me that in the final hours during which he could access his email, he contacted researchers whose projects he was supporting. “All I could tell them was, ‘Hey, you aren’t going to hear from me again, but good luck.’”
The polar-research community is pessimistic about the odds of recovery. Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, fears that funding cuts will follow the loss of the program directors. “There are a few senators who are champions of this stuff, but in this budget-cutting environment, they are going to have lots of other priorities to protect,” he told me. Sridhar Anandakrishnan, a glaciologist at Penn State, told me he worries that the global prestige of America’s polar-science programs will suffer. Work of this kind requires permanent infrastructure that only rich countries can build. The NSF has recently sought to make up for its various problems by leaning into international partnerships, but other countries may not be as interested in them going forward, Anandakrishnan said. “They may wonder if the NSF even has the bandwidth, or if it can still be trusted as a partner.”
Trump has always recoiled from the international character of climate science, and since his return to the White House, he has sought to hobble its global institutions. On his first day in office, he withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. He later forbade American government scientists from working on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On the domestic front, Trump has frozen all NSF grants, including those that fund climate science. A court has since paused that order’s enforcement, but some money transfers are reportedly still being held up. A wait-and-see atmosphere has seized the whole field while Congress negotiates a new federal budget: Some graduate programs have paused admissions and universities have instituted hiring freezes. The Trump administration has reportedly proposed a 30 percent budget cut to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the world’s most comprehensive sources of climate data. Mass layoffs at NOAA have reportedly already begun. The administration did many of these things during the planet’s hottest January on record.
Climate change is a global problem, and its effects are best studied closely wherever they occur, but especially in Antarctica. More than 80 percent of the planet’s ice sits atop its surface. Scientists have lately focused on West Antarctica’s ice sheet, because it has historically looked more unstable. If and when it slides into the ocean, sea levels could rise by up to 10 feet, erasing islands and inundating cities that sit near the world’s shorelines, where more than 40 percent of all people live. Anandakrishnan told me that he and his colleagues now suspect that East Antarctica’s ice sheets could be similarly unstable. It will take work to find out how shaky they are, and whether anything can be done to keep them in place.
Trump will almost certainly bequeath a warmer Earth to the next administration. The past five American presidents have each done the same. What makes Trump different is his insistence on disrupting the basic apparatus of climate science, the effort to understand how warm the planet will one day become, and how quickly its seas will rise. Heating up the world for future generations is a crime, but this is a cover-up.
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