With Trump killing off funding and staffing for research into climate and the Arctic, the U.S. polar science community is fighting for its life.
When President Donald Trump’s was re-elected in November 2024, Arctic scientists in the U.S. began fretting about what his second term in office would spell for climate change policy and research. Soon after he strutted back into the Oval Office, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement to raucous applause hours after being inaugurated, that handwringing metastasized into existential fear. As one climate scientist posted to Cryolist, an email listserv connecting thousands of people who research all things frozen around the world, “The cryospheric community in the US is facing an existential threat in an unprecedented way.”
As an Arctic researcher, every day, I wake up to grim headlines of cuts to funding that had supported research into climate change and for and by Indigenous Peoples and minorities. Doomscrolling can’t be avoided when it enters your inbox on a daily basis. It would be impossible – and unethical – to look away at this critical juncture.
The stories I read and hear remind me of the fear-stricken environment teaching in Hong Kong a few years ago, when civil liberties were erased by the passage of a new National Security Law in 2020 and universities became battlegrounds. Overnight, words like “liberation” and “revolution” were banned. Now, in the US, the phrases on the chopping block are climate change, diversity, equity, and inclusion. One US scientist told The Guardian that they needed to remove the phrase “climate change” from the title of their previously awarded grant in order to keep it.
On Thursday, I hosted an event attended at the University of Washington aimed at fostering an Arctic research community. While the university is a powerhouse in Arctic and polar research, its enormous size, with over 34,000 employees, can be weakness. The many institutes working on the region, from the Applied Physics Laboratory’s Polar Science Center to the Jackson School of International Affairs’ Arctic Initiative, tend to be siloed from one another.
Almost 40 Arctic researchers at the University of Washington came to the event. The first question that people often asked each other was: “How have you been affected?” The mood was one of gallows humor, the kind uttered by people who know that the end is near, so you might as well go down laughing.
Some attendees wondered aloud where they could turn to for funding to support their research on climate change and the Arctic. With academia in the United Kingdom having fallen off the deep end since Brexit and Europe in its own state of turmoil, one Arctic scientist indicated that he might start looking to his colleagues in China for funding opportunities. I am certain this is the outcome Trump has in mind for US polar science.
Bulldozing of US polar science bodes well for China
If any country is going to come out ahead in polar science given the enormous cuts facing the US research community, it is China. Already, between 2010-2018, Chinese scientific publications on the Arctic and Antarctic doubled in number, as one study of bibliometric data revealed. As America re-enters the dark ages, China will likely continue to outpace the country. The irony is thick given that the US Department of Defense noted in its 2024 Arctic Strategy that China represents a “pacing challenge.”
Last week, during a US Senate committee hearing on Greenland, Senator Ted Cruz contended that he “is committed to ending Russian and Chinese icebreaker dominance.” I’m not sure how this will happen if the country doesn’t even have scientists and engineers studying ice. Construction of three heavy icebreakers for the US Coast Guard is already at least five years behind schedule and billions of dollars into cost overruns. One waits to see when this project’s excesses will fall victim to DOGE.
I suppose Trump’s firing on his first day in office Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Linda Fagan, the first uniformed female to lead a military branch, supposedly for paying too much attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion, offers a harbinger of things to come to the armed forces, which have shown increasing interest in the Arctic, climate change, and diversity.
Just last night, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced their intentions to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (General Charles CQ Brown, who Trump had nominated to be the Air Force Chief of Staff during his first term, and who was elevated to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Biden), the chief of naval operations (Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to serve as the highest officer in the Navy), and the vice chief of the Air Force James Slife, a four-star general. There is no doubt that these leaders will be replaced with wildly unqualified Trump loyalists who still imagine the Arctic as a lily-white, perennially frozen region.
US-Russia peace talks: What consequences for Arctic research?
While gathered around a table at the University of Washington Arctic research networking event, I asked one colleague originally from Russia what they thought the US-Russia “peace” talks ongoing in Saudi Arabia might spell for Arctic research. They noted that a resolution to the war in Ukraine under the current circumstances would prove devastating to freedom of speech, academia, and civil society in Russia. Trump, they said, was completely vindicating Putin. Russian news networks now show clips from Fox TV that exonerate the Russian war criminal. Should the war end, his grip on domestic society will only tighten. With so many of their young men dying on the battlefield, Russians badly need and want the fight to have been a worthy one.
US researchers might technically be able to return to Russia if relations are “normalized.” They may even be able to use their Visa and Mastercards during their travels, because that’s precisely what hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians have died for. Priceless sacrifices, indeed.
But my colleague emphasized that many American universities would likely still not permit sponsored travel to Russia, making it impossible to go as part of a funded and insured work trip. While Russian archives are open, it’s not safe to access them since the Kremlin has deemed any research that is even remotely critical a danger to the state. Russian researchers, too, often fear any form of communication with foreigners, let alone collaboration, lest they be seen as colluding with the enemy.
The environment for academic freedom in Russia is lethal. Researchers, journalists, and activists face jail time for any misstep. Their counterparts in the US do not face these sort of threats. Yet they are reckoning with loss of livelihood, meaning, and public acceptance. This means that Arctic research in not just one major Arctic state, but two, risks annihilation.
The evisceration of climate change research
During the Cold War, nationally-scaled military, security, and economic interests motivated a great deal of research in all of the eight Arctic states, including the US and Russia but also Canada and the Nordic countries, as an article led by historian Ronald Doel explains. This trend seems to be rearing its head again.
The difference between science during the Cold War and today is that the US and Russia are willfully ignoring and even attacking work on climate change despite it being one of the most pressing issues facing the region. Even the US security establishment recognizes this fact. In 2014, the Pentagon released a report noting that climate change posed “immediate risks” to national security.” In 2017, Trump’s former defense secretary James Mattis acknowledged in Senate testimony that climate change was real and that it posed a threat to US overseas interests and Department of Defense assets around the world. Under Trump 2.0, that threat has somehow simply disappeared – as have the people working on the bête noire of the new administration.
In the month since Trump has taken office, over 10 percent of the US National Science Foundation has been fired, including “all of its experts, a class of contract workers who are specialists in niche scientific fields,” according to Politico. Making matters worse, the experts did not have to be let go. Instead, NSF leaders decided to fire them in the interest of “fairness” given that probationary workers were required to be made redundant. In a sudden return of McCarthyism, NSF staff meetings are no longer recorded out of fear of who might get a hold of the tapes.
Entire programs are now gone, too. The entire staff at the Human Environment and Geographic Sciences Program, which has funded research into issues such as climate change and human-environment relations, has been shown the door. Millions of dollars in funding that was set to be awarded by the NSF in the coming weeks to researchers who had spent countless hours refining their proposals are now likely to never see the light of day.
Mass firings also appear imminent at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) now that the new Secretary of Commerce*, Howard Lutnick, has been sworn in. NOAA is responsible for the nation’s Arctic Research Program, which has two missions. The first is to understand how the ocean, sea ice, and atmosphere are interacting in order to understand the impacts of climate change on ecosystems and biological resources like fisheries. The second is to enhance the science that informs the country’s ability to safely navigate, respond to oil spills, and advance economic development in the Arctic. One of NOAA’s most widely known outputs is its annual Arctic Report Card, which provides a valuable a summary of the state of affairs in the region each autumn. Whether a report card will be issued in 2025 remains to be seen. The Trump administration seems fixated on closing the icebreaker gap with Russia and China, but acquiring big boy toys will be useless without knowledge of the operational environment.
The Cold War‘s scientific fallout
During the Cold War, nuclear war and radiation were perceived as the biggest threats facing humanity. In the US, the Atomic Energy Commission became interested in ecology and radiation ecology in particular, or the study of how the environment and organisms are affected by exposure to radiation. Yet, as sociologist Brian Lindseth explains, the state also wanted to make sure that they could control the research agendas of ecologists. For their part, some ecologists thought that the point of science was to inform political officials and policymakers. Other ecologists felt a responsibility to oppose nuclear weapons and the overall weaponization of technology during the Cold War. Their political awakening broke with the scientific culture that had dominated since the nineteenth century, which prized objectivity above all else.
In the past two decades, climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic have forced scientists to once again reassess their positions in society. Are they meant to be neutral middlemen who simply do their research from their desks, labs, and field sites, communicate their findings, and then see how the cards fall? Or should they actively insert themselves into public debate and take stands informed by their own findings, yet possibly at the risk of losing the authority they enjoy, which comes from being perceived as objective?
The choice may now be moot. Under Trump, even climate scientists who would prefer to somehow stay below the political fray cannot. The administration has made their work by definition political. Climate science is seen as “climate fanaticism,” and the temple of worship must be rooted out. Project 2025, the political initiative promoted by the Heritage Foundation and dozens of conservative partners across the US and which is serving as a playbook for the Trump administration, spells out its goals for all to see:
Of course, science has never been neutral, and objectivity is something of a mirage. Perhaps what is more valuable and reliable is intersubjectivity, or when personal biases are removed through the collective process of scientist after scientist coming to the same observation or finding. When it comes to climate change, a study published in 2021 found that 98.7% of climate scientists and 100% of expert-level climate scientists agree that human activities are making the Earth warmer. At least the “fanatics” can agree.
Trump seeks to exorcise anyone and everyone working on climate change. Though his push has only been in the works for one month, it will leave scars for decades to come. Many universities that are heavily dependent on federal funding, including some departments at my own institution, have frozen faculty hiring and are rescinding or stopping graduate student admissions. This will deal generational blows. Institutions can be torn down overnight, but they cannot be rebuilt in a day. His vitriolic efforts will also hasten the trajectory to a world that is at least 2°C warmer – one in which the Arctic as we know it is totally and utterly gone.
US Arctic science and the communities they risk abandoning
The cuts to scientific funding are enormous. Government agencies are collapsing and institutional knowledge is disappearing overnight. NOAA may soon be incapable of issuing warnings about hurricanes, let alone the state of the Arctic ice cap. In times like these, it is crucial to build and maintain community with whatever means possible, whether that means getting together in small groups to maintain a sense of solidarity or working virtually with international colleagues who might have access to precious research funding.
US science must take a stand, for its survival depends on it. I hesitate to say that the world’s survival depends on it, for the world will continue in some form, just as it would if a nuclear war went off. But a world without US contributions to climate science and polar science, where it has been a leader for decades, will not be a pretty one.
A paper led by former NASA climate scientist James Hansen published earlier this February found that in the past two years alone, global temperature skyrocketed 0.4°C. The authors observe that “polar climate change has the greatest long-term effect on humanity” due to the potential for polar ice melt to inject huge amounts of freshwater into the North Atlantic Ocean. This could shut down the Gulf Stream within the next 20 to 30 years with disastrous effects on the global environment, from rising sea levels along the US East Coast to colder winters in Europe and flipped seasons in the Amazon. Given Trump’s policies, this tipping point may come sooner than ever, though still long after he could face recrimination.
Who will carry the torch of Arctic research?
After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the loss of Russia and all its scientists, Indigenous observers, and observing networks from Arctic science was seen as a colossal blow. Few anticipated that the US would soon start to drop out of the picture, too.
Over the next few years, the rigorous pursuit of Arctic science will be left to the Nordic countries and Canada, along with the European Union, Asian states, and Gulf states. Arctic science may therefore be increasingly carried out by people whose governments do not possess Arctic territory and by people who are still in the very early stages of building relationships with communities in the Arctic. This will reshape the objectives and networks of Arctic science in unforeseen ways. Studies of the ocean and atmosphere may become more common than coastal or terrestrially-focused ones. Techniques like remote sensing, which do not depend on physical presence or require community permission compared to in-situ methods, may grow more popular, too.
Despite these challenges, the circumpolar ties, knowledge, and community that have been built up since the end of the Cold War are worth preserving. On the one hand, we should be open to sharing this legacy with the newcomers who may continue to advance Arctic science and research. On the other, the people living in the Arctic will need to closely evaluate whether and how Arctic science suits their needs. For centuries, they have faced destructive boom and bust cycles associated with resource extraction. Now, US-funded science is suddenly upping sticks, too.
In Alaska, communities such as Utqiagvik have come to depend on science as a revenue-generating sector, such is the contribution to the local economy by the teams that show up every year thanks to generous federal funds. Will they come this summer, or will their empty laboratories and research stations turn into ruins, much like the abandoned mines and oil rigs that litter the rest of the Arctic? As with so much of the history of the Arctic, the region’s communities and environment will shoulder the heaviest costs of decisions made in the south.
*Why is NOAA in the Department of Commerce, and what does this have to do with the Arctic?
Perplexingly, NOAA falls under the Department of Commerce – an awkward location it has held since its formation in 1970. NOAA, which brought together the Survey of the Coast (established in 1807), the Weather Bureau (established in 1870), and the US Commission of Fish and Fisheries (established in 1871), was placed under the Department of Commerce rather than the Department of Interior, which would have made more sense given the latter’s focus on the environment, as a punishment meted out by then-president Richard Nixon against his Secretary of the Interior, Wally Hickel, for criticizing him over the Vietnam War.
Incidentally, Hickel was a two-time governor of Alaska (1966-1968 and, decades later, from 1990-1994). The self-made millionaire is perhaps best known for his tireless work championing the “the reality, the richness, and the responsibility of the North,” as described in a 2011 bill passed by the Alaska State Legislature establishing August 18, 2012 as the Walter J. Hickel Day of the Arctic. Nixon’s former secretary also founded the Institute of the North, which promotes sustainable development and commons governance, such as of fisheries.
Hickel would probably be rolling in his grave at seeing how NOAA, punished at its inception, now faces direr threats. In a widely-read piece published in Readers Digest in 1973 entitled “The Day of the Arctic has come,” he urged improving information about the extent of continental shelves, refining maps of the region, understanding the problems facing the inhabitants in Arctic settlements, and, most of all, working across borders in pursuit of the “cooperative international development of the whole of the polar region.” NOAA has contributed immensely to many of these tasks, but this work is now in mortal danger.
