With the Trump administration sabotaging scientific knowledge gathered over half a century, US polar scientists are urgently trying to build their resilience.
For decades, American scientists have been collecting observations about the Arctic. They have trained their satellites on its ice cap, launched icebreaker expeditions into the polar seas, dropped their probes in the rivers atop the Greenland Ice Sheet, and waded through mosquito-infested swamps to retrieve their sensors. Their efforts produced all sorts of data, from monthly records of sea ice thickness to stunning, high-resolution maps of nearly every square meter of the Arctic.
A great deal of this work has been funded by American taxpayers. In 2024 alone, the budget for the US National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Office of Polar Programs, which supports Arctic and Antarctic research, was over half a billion dollars. Thanks to being publicly funded, much of the data produced by American scientists has been made freely available to the entire world. Websites like the NSF’s Arctic Data Center showcase the diversity of data produced thanks to its grants, from river water chemistry samples collected from the Arctic’s six “great rivers” to simulations of how small mammals affect vegetation cover in Alaska.
Now, devastating cuts by the Trump administration threaten not only future Arctic research projects, but the maintenance of data that has already been collected – much of it for decades. While the president might boast that his cuts will save Americans “trillions of dollars” over the next decade, what is happening is akin to burning down a house that has taken decades of painstaking work to build.
Helping deploy probes into a river on the Greenland Ice Sheet in summer 2014. Photo: Mia Bennett
Trump administration deals sudden blows to US polar science
Earlier this week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is responsible for producing everything from daily sea ice forecasts to the annual Arctic Report Card, announced that it would decommission its snow and ice data products. These include its world-class sea ice index, snow data products, glacier photographs, world glacier inventory, Arctic sea ice charts, and grids of monthly sea ice extent and concentration from 1850 onward. Basically, nearly any map made in the US including ice and snow in the past several decades has likely included some of this data. Now that it is being decommissioned, it will “remain accessible but may not be actively maintained, updated, or fully supported.”
NOAA’s worrying announcement followed on the heels of another big blow to to US polar science. In late April, the Polar Geospatial Center, based at the University of Minnesota, published its annual release of digital elevation models, or representations of the Earth’s terrain, for the Arctic and Antarctica (the ArcticDEM and Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica products, respectively). The publication of this data came with the caveat that it “may be the last of its kind…for the foreseeable future.” As the Polar Geospatial Center discloses, funding constraints mean that they will no longer be able to produce these high-resolution data products. Their announcement underscored, “This marks the end of a transformative era for polar science and a critical moment to reflect, respond, and rally support.”
In fact, it has now become clear that funding for the Polar Geospatial Center, which came from the NSF, will not be renewed. As British climate scientist Ruth Mottram put it on Bluesky, “This is naked vandalism.” Many people, including me, have been trained at the Polar Geospatial Center over the years. Back in 2015, I participated in a free summer school for graduate students to learn about how to use and analyze polar geospatial data. Without their support and products, I would be much worse off when it comes to making maps of the Arctic.
The Polar Geospatial Center’s beautiful map of Arctic terrain in high resolution. Source.
Zooming in on 5-meter DEM of Longyearbyen, Svalbard from the Polar Geospatial Center. At this high resolution, satellites on top of the plateau in the bottom left corner and the houses in the valley in the top center of the image are visible.
The near-term outlook for US polar science looks even worse
At the moment, the scenario for the US polar research community next year looks even worse. Trump and his lackeys are taking a sledgehammer to all things science and climate, putting the work of people like glaciologists, polar oceanographers, and Indigenous experts directly in the administration’s crosshairs. An indignant letter from Russell Vought, director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, to Senator Susan Collins, chair of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, argued that a review of the 2025 federal budget revealed it to be “laden with spending contrary to the needs of ordinary working Americans and tilted toward funding niche non-governmental organizations and institutions of higher education committed to radical gender and climate ideologies antithetical to the American way of life.”
NOAA contends with 25% budget cuts
NOAA stands to lose a huge amount of resources yet. Vought’s letter proposes cutting $209 million from the agency’s annual budget for its procurement of weather satellites and infrastructure. NOAA owns and operates 18 satellites, including the polar-orbiting, polar-observing Joint Polar Satellite System. While its fleet of five satellites does cover the Arctic, despite its name, the system also provides some of the primary data for weather forecasting across the entire US, especially during severe weather events and natural disasters, like hurricanes.
Ignoring the criticality of the data collected by NOAA’s suite of satellites for the entire country, and indeed for much of the world, Vought’s letter argues for cancelling “contracts for instruments designed primarily for unnecessary climate measurements rather than weather observations.” A further $1.3 billion stands to be eliminated from NOAA’s operations, research, and grants budget, much of which the letter claims was going to support “a variety of climate-dominated research, data, and grant programs.” In total, the proposed $1.5 billion in cuts will slash 25% from NOAA’s current budget.
NSF faces 55% budget cuts
The NSF faces even harsher reductions amounting to 55% of its annual budget. Some $3.5 billion in cuts target “climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences; and programs in low priority areas of science.” A further $1.1 billion in cuts are aimed at programs to broaden participation in science. The vindictiveness simply bleeds through Vought’s letter.
While the White House claims these cost reductions will save money for Main Street, they will affect all sorts of ordinary Americans in and beyond Alaska. For instance, a failure to provide timely sea ice products risks harming the ability of local residents, fishermen, and mariners to safely navigate or provide emergency first response. And if there is no longer regularly updated information on permafrost melt and coastal erosion in Alaska, it might be harder for communities to plan for climate adaptation. Their own local observations are of course hugely helpful. But climate models can help indicate where it might be safe for the next thirty years to build new homes or pinpoint the ice cellars, which store traditional foods like whale and seal meat underground, that might be at risk from climate change a decade from now.
Without data on the Arctic, US military bases from Alaska to Greenland may also find themselves increasingly uncertain as to how to protect their infrastructure from a changing climate. In 2022, it was reported that permafrost thaw and the build-up of water under infrastructure at Pituffik Space Force Base in Greenland had damaged runways and aircraft hangars. While the White House might dismiss climate change as radical, the Pentagon has recognized for years that it constitutes a threat to national security. Now, as Trump looks to obtain Greenland by any means necessary, he may lack access to the very data that would help manage (or, let’s be real, steal) its resources.
Pituffik Space Base’s runways and aircraft hangars are at risk from permafrost thaw. Source: Defenseimagery.mil, VIRIN DF-ST-90-10597, 1989.
First, Arctic science lost Russia. Now, the field risks losing the US
The loss of field sites and sensors in Russia following the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 posed a big blow to the integrity of circumpolar science. The country comprises half of the region’s territory, yet it was already underrepresented in many observation networks. With Russia cut off from most international science after its tanks crossed into Ukraine, there is an even larger hole now in Arctic research. As a recent paper in Nature Climate Change warns, without Russia in the picture, examinations of environmental change in the Arctic risk becoming even more biased.
Most of the efforts after the Cold War to integrate Russia into polar science, which had succeeded in building interpersonal ties and establishing observation networks of sensors and monitors across the country’s five million square kilometers of Arctic territory, have fallen victim to the war. Those who still try to collaborate with Russia, let alone visit the country, often face retribution. Professor Lassi Heinenen lost his emeritus position at the University of Lapland in Finland after it became known that he had traveled to Moscow for a conference on the Arctic and Russian Far East in 2024.
Over the past three years, many scientists have come to accept the loss of Russia from polar science. Yet the White House’s decision to turn away from polar science seems to be a harder pill to swallow. As I heard one scientist remark to an audience at an event on Arctic sustainability at the University of Tromsø last month, “This is something we didn’t see coming in the US.”
Not much collaboration with Russia these days… A photo from Murmansk in summer 2018. Photo: Mia Bennett
Not the first time Arctic knowledge has been at risk
The polar science community is experiencing firsthand what it means to face the loss of knowledge. It carries with it feelings of being unmoored and untethered, and can result in the sense of losing a grip on both one’s legacy and on the future. This is a problem that Arctic Indigenous Peoples have wrestled with since the dual onslaught of colonization and capitalism. For generations, they passed down their traditional knowledge, which was gleaned from experience rather than study, about things like sea ice, wind, snow, and animal migration patterns orally, in their ancestral tongues. With Indigenous languages threatened and with rapid technological change altering how people pass on information, Indigenous Peoples have had to adapt to sustain their knowledge.
Now, with the Trump administration sabotaging scientific knowledge gathered across over half a century, polar scientists are urgently trying to build their resilience, too. People are calling for quickly copying existing data and making mirrors of archives which, once billed as long-term, are now proving to be as ephemeral as summer sea ice.
For years, polar scientists have researched how to help Arctic communities withstand radical changes to their environment. But the tables have turned, and time is of the essence. In the US, polar researchers must determine how to safeguard their scientific knowledge and observations from being lost forever due to forces beyond their control. Yes, we still have agency: we can vote, and we can call our representatives. But a great deal of polar data could be lost sooner than election day. Determining how to preserve data and how to keep satellites, sensors, and all manner of crucial observation networks running in the meantime will need a faster response. Bridge funding provided by philanthropic organizations and funding and collaboration with European and Asian partners are some possible avenues. More will need to be discovered, and soon. The time now is not for producing new knowledge, but ensuring that we do not lose what we have already gained.
