Employees have already pushed back. “People are painting the trash that say” Antarctica is for everyone “in the rainbow, people’s email signatures [have] The additions of pride, [others] Continue adding preferential pronouns to emails. “
“There is anxiety at the station, like people have never felt,” they add. “It still has to do it, even if people feel the next shoe can fall every moment.”
This anxiety spreads to their own job security. “There are now some people in South Antarctica who are concerned about losing their job every day,” says one source. Workers at the station until October are unable to leave the body and offers a short -term or budget firing set of unique challenges.
Resources are also declining to reduce the NSF budget by 50 % due to DOGE. These cuts are trying to dispatch Antarctic scientists with assistants and graduates. “We didn’t know if we could go to graduates,” said one scientist. While investigations into the continent are conducted, scientists return their findings to the United States to process and analyze. Many of the budget also manages science itself: for a project that requires electricity to execute the trackers, the “paranoid was that we would not be able to pay for a hungry test for data.” This has not yet been concluded, but with the start of the budget cycles in the coming weeks and months, scientists are in the tents.
Sources say wired that Germany, Canada, Spain and China have used this uncertainty by hiring American scientists focused on Antarctica.
“Foreign countries are seriously hiring my colleagues, and some have already left,” says one Antarctic scientist. “My students are now looking for jobs abroad … people are coming [to the US] To do the science of my whole life. Now people are going to another way. “
Another Antarctic scientist says, “It’s a great time to see if someone wants to jump the ship.” “I am worried about evacuating the brain of continuous academics or students who have left.”
“The damages caused by the intestine [Antarctic] The scientific budget will be like these generations. “
During a decline in the federal government, the delegates have said that if something needs to be returned, it could be. In some cases, inversions have already occurred: the US Department of Agriculture said it accidentally works employees to prevent the spread of bird flu and is trying to repeat them.
But in Antarctica, inversion will not necessarily work. “One of the really scary things about this is that if the Antarctic program budget is reduced, they will get to the point where they can’t even keep the station open, much of the scientific projects will continue.” “If South Pole [station] It is closed, it is almost impossible to restore it. Everything freezes and buries in the snow. And some other countries will probably take over immediately.
