The National Science Foundation announced Tuesday the cancellation of the U.S Antarctic Research Program due to the government shutdown.
The federal agency had to cancel the $10-million program which came as no surprise to them. However, the decision doesn’t lessen the impact of operation shutdown for all research in the polar region. It actually entails wasted groundwork time and millions of money invested in planned research.
NSF researchers have invested an ample amount of time in planning and operations for conducting the studies and this will be lost by ceasing the operations. Northern Illinois University geologist Ross Powell told LiveScience, "If we don't get this field season, basically, we've wasted half the money."
The Whillans Ice Stream Sub glacial Access Research Drilling (WISSARD) project led by Powell is the first expedition team to drill out and unearth life from the Antarctic lake’s bottom. This year, the WISSARD team is scheduled to do drilling works in the Whillans Ice Stream where it overlaps with the sea. Remote sensing studies lead to the possibility that water from the Lake Whillans stream out into the sea under the Ross Ice Shelf, which results to something similar to an estuary.
Dawn Sumner, another researcher is also extremely frustrated at the news. As a geobiologist from the University of California, she was scheduled for an Antarctica trip on October 17 for her research on the Antarctic lake’s microbial life which is highly dependent on timing. "Mine is somewhat time-sensitive; we can't do it in midsummer,” she told LiveScience. She is hoping that the Congress can get “its act together” to save her planned research.
Other critical researches that might be affected by the cancellation are the Operation IceBridge by NASA and the current climate change monitoring in the polar region. These projects accuracy rely heavily on uninterrupted data gathering and therefore won’t produce satisfactory analysis of global warming trends.
Other scientists from countries like Italy, France and New Zealand are also very dependent on the U.S McMurdo Station facilities in completing their researches. Moreover, there could be graduate students who would have to extend their stay in school to wait and start again with their research once the program gets reinstated.
According to the NSF, they will push for operations to be resumed soon after the government shutdown. Currently, contractors and researchers who are at the Antarctica Research bases will soon return to their homes and only a few will remain as maintenance support for the stations and equipment.
