To the untrained eye, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Ice Core Facility in Lakewood, Colorado, doesn’t look like much: a boxy brick building packed with shelves of ice-filled metallic cylinders 10 centimeters in diameter. But to the more than 100 scientists who pull from its frozen records annually, it’s a treasure trove of information on our changing climate.
The facility holds more than 13 miles—200 football field lengths—of tubes of ice collected from Antarctica, Greenland, and other parts of North America. Their contents can date back hundreds of thousands of years, allowing researchers to engage in scientific time travel. Crucially, the ice provides clues as to what’s in store for our climate down the road. But now President Donald Trump’s assault on science has put this invaluable resource at risk.
“If you drill down in an ice sheet, the deeper you go, the older the ice gets,” says Benjamin Riddell-Young, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies methane isotopes. One recent experiment involved analyzing molecules trapped in ancient ice from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide, including cores recovered from around 2 miles underground. “When the snow falls and compresses into ice, it forms these little bubble cavities that trap the air at the time the ice was formed,” he explains.
Those tiny bubble cavities can lead to big discoveries. Researchers have used prehistoric ice samples to determine global temperatures, weather patterns, and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations in the distant past. Ice cores have provided some of the best data for tracking climate change—and the researchers who use the NSF facility have racked up an impressive roster of publications. Just last year, some of them found that atmospheric CO2 is increasing 10 times faster than at any point in the last 50,000 years. In another study, published by the journal Nature in January, Riddell-Young and his former adviser, Ed Brook, a professor of earth, ocean, and atmospheric sciences at Oregon State University, linked increased wildfire activity during the last ice age to abrupt shifts in the prevalence of greenhouse gases.
Riddell-Young and Brook were studying the past, but their knowledge helps researchers better understand the effects of climate change today—including its likely role in the fires that ravaged Los Angeles. “We study the past in part because we want to calibrate climate models that we use for the future,” Brook says.
The urgency of ice-core research has intensified in recent years because, as the planet warms up, the historical record captured in the ice is slowly melting. The miles-deep ice should be safe for another century, but researchers are already finding water when they drill closer to the surface. “We came too late,” Margit Schwikowski, a recently retired professor at Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute, lamented in a report. “We need to speed up to safeguard heritage ice cores.”
Rising temperatures aren’t the only threat. Funding for Riddell-Young and Brook’s study and others like it also comes from the NSF, which keeps the Colorado facility cold and running. In the two months after their Nature study was published, the Trump administration fired 10 percent of the agency’s 1,500-person staff, including several specialists working in Antarctica. Federally funded researchers have lost grants mentioning climate change, leading their peers to remove the phrase from research proposals. But for scientists using the Ice Core Facility and studying the history of global climate, that can be exceedingly difficult.
The Trump administration also has proposed slashing the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, another key funder of climate research, by at least a quarter. Reductions of such magnitude would endanger that agency’s collaborations with universities—including the one where Riddell-Young works.
Geopolitical tensions, too, imperil US involvement in Arctic research. Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, international scientists have been cut off from Russian sections of the Arctic. Trump’s aggression toward Greenland and Canada also poses threats to the reserves. “It makes science diplomacy virtually impossible,” says Klaus Dodds, who studies polar geopolitics at the University of London.
Dodds, who is British, describes the United States as a “premier polar power” because of decades of investment in studying the region. But when asked about the future, his optimism fades: “Unfortunately, it could be imperiled because of these swinging funding cuts.” Oregon State’s Brook concurs. “I fear we’ll lose our competitive edge in science,” he says.
The science world is hedging its bets as US leadership wanes. In 2021, researchers from France, Italy, and Switzerland created the Ice Memory Foundation to collect and save ice cores from locations that are particularly endangered by climate change. Collaborating with 10 nations, the group, which is funded by private philanthropists and governments, collects cores from glaciers at risk of melting and plans to store them deep in the Antarctic Plateau, where temperatures are more stable.
Such efforts are essential, Riddell-Young points out, because “there’s questions that we don’t know we should be asking yet.” And then, “maybe 30 years down the line, we’ll say, ‘If only we had an ice core from this location, we could have answered this, but now that ice core is gone.’”
The administration has continued to chip away at Arctic science, alongside widespread cuts to all US science disciplines.
In April, the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota lost its funding. In early May, NOAA decommissioned its snow and ice data products. A mid-May analysis by the New York Times found that there is an 88 percent monetary reduction in the average grants awarded this year for polar science, as opposed to the average of previous years.
Last month, the Trump administration released its proposed budget, which encourages Congress to slash the NSF by over half, citing “climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences.” While Antarctic infrastructure funding, which maintains the Arctic stations, remains relatively unscathed, 70 percent of the research funding in the Office of Polar Programs is proposed to be cut.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.