In an image provided by the US Department of Defence, personnel gather on the bow of the Nathaniel B. Palmer, the sole US icebreaker dedicated to Antarctic research, as it traversed the Bellingshausen Sea on March 15, 2020. Among the many deep cuts to scientific research in the Trump Administration’s proposed budget is the abrupt termination of the Nathaniel B. Palmer. Photo / US Naval Research Laboratory, The New York Times
When it comes to the future of the world’s coasts, few places on Earth matter more than the ice-choked, storm-tossed Bellingshausen Sea.
There, the warm ocean currents whirling around Antarctica first wash up on to the continental shelf and bathe the vast ice sheet, making the region the tip of the spear for the melting processes that are raising sea levels globally.
So when Andy Thompson, an environmental scientist at the California Institute of Technology, got a chance to go to the Bellingshausen next year, he seized it.
There’s so much to be discovered there that any expedition is the oceanographic equivalent of going to the moon, Thompson said.
Now, United States Government cost-cutting could take away the ship.
Among the many deep cuts to scientific research in the Trump Administration’s proposed Budget is the abrupt termination of the Nathaniel B. Palmer, the sole US icebreaker dedicated to Antarctic research.
The Budget also pauses development of a new vessel that was supposed to succeed the Palmer in the 2030s.
The Administration says the cuts will free up resources for America’s three ageing Antarctic research stations.
Scientists said they would endanger decades of US leadership in studying the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic coast, where waters warmed by the emissions from burning fossil fuels are melting the ice from below.
After half a century in which the US has had one or more ships devoted to Antarctic science, the Palmer’s decommissioning would effectively cede access to the most unexplored region of the globe to other nations.
And given how booked up those nations’ ships are, polar veterans said the chances were slim that many stranded American scientists could easily hitch new rides.
“I just think it’s tragic, really, for US science,” said Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey.
Graduate students and younger scientists will be hit hardest, Larter said. Unable to do field work and publish research, many of them will simply quit polar science, he said.
“Effectively, you’ve lost a whole generation, a lot of expertise that will be lost and difficult to restart,” Larter said.
When asked about the Palmer’s fate, the National Science Foundation, which runs the US polar research programme, said it had “started the process” to terminate its lease on the ship.
The agency said it would “identify vessels and partnerships to continue support of marine science” and assess next year whether to resume evaluating potential vendors for the Palmer’s successor. Planning for the successor ship has been under way for more than two decades.
Named after the Connecticut sealer and whaler who is believed to be among the first Americans to see the Antarctic mainland, the Nathaniel B. Palmer can host 39 scientists and staff members.
It has six labs, an aquarium room and a hangar for two helicopters, plus a sauna, gym and movie lounge. It can bash through a metre of ice while travelling at 3 knots, or 5.6km/h.
Jamin Greenbaum, a polar geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, thinks of the Palmer, which is nearing its 35th birthday, like a trusty old pick-up truck.
There are ships with more bells and whistles: Britain’s new polar vessel, the Sir David Attenborough, for instance. There are smaller, more specialised ships.
The Palmer is “like this middle-of-the-road, good, reliable truck that you love,” Greenbaum said.
Getting aboard isn’t easy. Every Antarctic field season, which typically runs from late October into March, the Palmer makes just a handful of voyages, each of them one to two months long. So even once scientists secure funding for an expedition, it can be years before they set sail.
At sea, the work is tough: the long travel times leave only a short, precious window for gathering data.
Abysmal weather and immobilising sea ice – plus the myriad unforeseeable obstacles that can arise in the planet’s harshest environments – shrink the window further.
It’s an invaluable experience, said Thompson.
His first trip to the Bellingshausen Sea was aboard the Palmer in 2019.
The measurements he and his team collected unlocked new insights about how warm currents reach the Antarctic coast and steered their plans for the return expedition he hopes to take next year, if the Palmer is still in service.
Working with colleagues in the focused and intense environment of a ship led to “real bursts of creativity”, Thompson said. “There’s no way of replicating that completely with autonomous vehicles.”
Rebecca Robinson, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island, travelled on the Palmer last year to observe the spring bloom of diatoms, the single-celled plankton that encode chemical signatures of the water around them in their shells.
Fossilised diatoms give scientists records of ocean history that can go back millions of years.
“It’s very expensive to work in Antarctica,” Robinson said. “It has high risk.”
Yet for understanding how the warming climate is changing this enormous part of the world, and how it is changing the rest of the planet in turn, there’s no substitute for being there, she said.
Antarctic research is globe-spanning by nature: scientists regularly collaborate with international colleagues and travel on other nations’ ships.
Such collaborations work best when they’re based on exchange, not one-way dependence, said Kurt Panter, a geologist at Bowling Green State University.
Panter travelled to the Ross Sea aboard the Palmer this year, in what might prove to have been the ship’s final science expedition. “I hope that isn’t the case,” he said.
Two or three decades ago, when South Korea had barely established its own polar science capabilities, American scientists generously shared their resources and expertise, said Won Sang Lee, a principal research scientist at the Korea Polar Research Institute. Today, South Korea would be glad to return the favour, Lee said.
But given how long it takes to plan Antarctic expeditions, it would be hard to slot many American researchers on to Korean voyages any time soon, Lee said.
South Korea recently commissioned a new polar science ship that will be twice as large as its current one, the Araon. China has five polar research vessels and is planning more.
“It’s just so odd that we’re contracting at a time when other nations are recognising the importance of advancing knowledge in these areas,” said Phil Bart, a geophysicist at Louisiana State University.
The Trump Administration’s domestic policy bill puts billions of dollars towards new Coastguard icebreakers in the Arctic, where the US is aiming to counter Russian and Chinese influence.
Coastguard ships support US research in Antarctica, though they aren’t set up to host many scientists or their instruments and labs.
The Palmer serves another function for US science: it hauls away the hazardous waste from America’s Antarctic stations.
The National Science Foundation could try chartering ships to do this. But “you’ll find it very difficult to charter a vessel that will handle somebody else’s waste”, said Larter. “Because no country wants it off-loaded.”
The NSF declined to say whether it had a plan for carrying waste if the Palmer is docked for good.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Raymond Zhong
Photographs by: US Naval Research Laboratory, Julie Parno, US Army Corps of Engineers
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