After two weeks, the federal government’s shutdown may have caused more worry than actual damage in the world of higher education. In its third week, however, the harm is becoming very real for hundreds of faculty members and students.
In an early sign of what may await their counterparts as the nation’s political impasse slogs on, many scientists associated with the country’s Antarctic research program—which relies on active federal support for access to the remote and barren continent—are already halting their work and pondering deferred careers.
Alia L. Khan, a University of Colorado at Boulder student, said her Ph.D. work in environmental engineering is being threatened by her inability to get back to Antarctica to retrieve soot samples that have been accumulating for months.
Catherine M. Luria’s Ph.D. work in biology at Brown University is in limbo as her colleagues already in Antarctica are now packing up to be sent home.
And Sebastian Vivancos, a Columbia University graduate, is due on board the evacuation ship that’s set to leave Antarctica’s Palmer Station on Thursday, leaving him anxious about his career just as he prepares to enroll in a Ph.D. program in geosciences.
“To realize that it is because our Congress cannot sit down and come together to draw up a budget is bewildering,” Mr. Vivancos said, describing the shutdown order facing Palmer Station. “For me, conducting research in Antarctica is the greatest opportunity of a lifetime.”
The U.S. government halted all activities deemed nonessential on October 1, the start of the 2014 fiscal year, after lawmakers failed to approve an annual operating budget.
Most federal money for university research is supplied months in advance, meaning work can continue even if money isn’t still rolling in.
But a major emerging exception is Antarctica, where hundreds of scientists from dozens of American colleges rely on logistics provided by the National Science Foundation and air transport from the U.S. military to reach the frozen outposts where they study subjects that include climate change, marine biology, and particle physics. Scientists from some of the many other nations working in Antarctica also rely on the U.S. mission to assist their operations.
Troublesome Timing
The timing of the shutdown is especially problematic. The Antarctic winter, with months of 24-hour darkness and average temperatures around minus 60 degrees Celsius, is just ending. With that, the population of the NSF’s three research stations—Palmer, McMurdo, and South Pole—typically goes from a couple of hundred to about 2,000, including support staff members.
Instead, the migration is going the other direction. McMurdo, the largest of the three stations, just began receiving its first wave of support staff members when the shutdown began and nonessential workers were sent back. Palmer, the smallest, had about 25 scientists and staff members arrive by ship last Tuesday, bringing its population to about 45, and all but a handful are due to leave on Thursday if the shutdown isn’t resolved by then.
Last week’s four-day boat trip to Palmer, over seas so rough that risking crashing waves and howling winds on a slippery deck was preferable to the nausea from taking cover below, gave an immediate reminder of the physical risks of working in Antarctica, Mr. Vivancos said.
The exhilaration of arrival changed into deep disappointment the next morning, he said, when a meeting originally scheduled as an orientation and tour of Palmer Station instead became the opportunity for official group notification that science operations were being shut down.
In addition to all the careers being put on hold, Mr. Vivancos and other scientists said, the suspension of research work in Antarctica will cost taxpayers money and prevent them from gaining important understanding of the world around them.
Several of the interrupted projects are intended to help answer a key question about climate change: whether warming temperatures and accumulating pollutants will trigger natural responses that work to reverse the effects of planetary heating, or instead will accelerate it.
Ms. Khan, who hopes to finish her Ph.D. by 2016, visited Antarctica at the end of the last summer season and installed a set of 11 soot-collection devices. She had hoped to return this season to see what fell in them during the winter, and prepare for new collections in the summer.
Atmospheric soot has complicated effects. In the atmosphere it can help cool the planet by reflecting sunlight, and on the ground it can accelerate melting by absorbing solar warmth.
One key question, Ms. Khan said, is whether the recent shrinking of the ozone hole over Antarctica, due to a global ban on chlorofluorocarbons, is weakening a wind pattern known as the polar vortex, allowing more soot particles to reach the continent.
Setbacks for Studies
Mr. Vivancos is part of a team led by Hugh W. Ducklow, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia who is studying how global warming affects bacteria in the Antarctic ecosystem. That system was traditionally believed to be dominated by relatively large organisms at every size range, from phytoplankton and zooplankton up to penguins, seals, and whales, Mr. Ducklow said.
Warming temperatures, however, could make the Antarctic ecosystem more dominated by small organisms, he said. That could make ocean systems less efficient at producing fish, and less efficient at storing carbon dioxide, patterns that could accelerate the effects of global warming, he said.
Another member of their team, James R. Collins, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, arrived with Mr. Vivancos on the ship and has spent the past few days with him, packing up equipment and figuring out what could be left behind in the hope of resuming their work. Mr. Collins was also working on his own project, for a Ph.D. he also hopes to complete by 2016, that involves studying the breakdown of cell membranes in algae as a result of ultraviolet radiation in Antarctica.
“This was supposed to be the core data-collection fieldwork for my dissertation,” he said. “I may really have to revisit the entire topic of my dissertation, honestly, because it was sort of predicated on being able to measure the processes down here, and the environments specifically.”
Ms. Luria, who also hopes to complete her Ph.D. in 2016, is working on a project closely related to Mr. Ducklow’s investigation. She’s also studying microbes, with the idea of comparing samples collected in the Antarctic winter with those taken in the summer. She has two co-workers collecting samples at Palmer who now face the prospect of being sent home without a chance for summer collections.
“A setback like this,” Ms. Luria said, “can have major effects on our dissertation and our ability to complete our degree on time, or at all.” The project already had been coping with one setback from Congress, as the federal-budget cuts known as sequestration had forced a cutback in ship service to Palmer, forcing the co-workers to travel there in May, two months ahead of schedule.
The shutdown also presents a more immediate bind for Mr. Collins. Part of his work is financed by the Environmental Protection Agency’s STAR graduate-fellowship program, and the EPA is now unable to pay his monthly living stipend, he said. “This is an enormous hassle and inconvenience and imposition,” Mr. Collins said. But, he said while packing up at Palmer, “that’s the least of my concerns down here.”
Costs to Taxpayers
The Antarctic shutdown may be hurting research and researchers, but it may also hurt taxpayers, said Diane M. McKnight, a professor of civil, environmental, and architectural engineering at the University of Colorado who has been working in Antarctica since 1987.
Ms. McKnight annually leads teams to the Dry Valleys region, near McMurdo Station, to collect water samples and monitor stream flows from melting glaciers. Her current group of 32 researchers is spending its days working out contingency plans for how it will salvage and prioritize its work, especially if they cannot get instruments in place before the summer melting begins.
One major concern is a set of huts they use alongside Lake Fryxell. If the federal shutdown forces the abandonment of Antarctic research for the entire summer season, and temperatures warm before anyone from the NSF program can move them farther back from the lake, the huts could be flooded and then embedded in ice, she said, creating financial losses and significant ecological damage to the pristine environment.
As with many problems surrounding the Antarctic program, it’s hard to know how the NSF will respond because virtually all of its employees have been furloughed in the shutdown. NSF officials have said they’ll formally consider the Antarctic program suspended on Monday if the government has not reopened by then, but they have declined to offer details on what exactly that will mean.
Those disgusted by the situation include Norman R. Augustine, the former chairman and chief executive of the defense contractor Lockheed Martin, who has headed two separate panels studying the Antarctic program. Both reviews concluded that the NSF-led operation was essential to U.S. national interests, both for the science and for the geopolitical value of having a physical presence on the continent.
“I do not know what the cost of the shutdown will be,” Mr. Augustine said when asked for an estimate of the losses that could result from an Antarctic shutdown. “It is just one more example of what we are doing to rip apart at the grassroots level the fabric of what is one of America’s few remaining competitive advantages: our research and education system. No enemy could have been so effective.”
