How NSF hopes to keep Antarctic scientists afloat without an icebreaker
Ending Palmer lease is one of many belt-tightening moves amid budget uncertainty
- 24 Oct 2025
- 12:25 PM ET
- ByJeffrey Mervis
In 2022, the National Science Foundation (NSF) gave University of Alabama geoscientist Tom Tobin a grant to drill rock cores at a remote site off the Antarctic peninsula. NSF told Tobin, who works on mass extinctions, that he’d have to wait 4 years for a vessel to take him there.
This summer, however, NSF canceled the lease on his long-awaited ride, the RV Nathaniel B. Palmer, the only U.S. research icebreaker dedicated to working in the treacherous waters of the Southern Ocean. NSF has since rebooked him on another ship, but it’s one that normally operates in the Arctic and lacks the Palmer’s capacity to crunch through thick sea ice.
Tobin’s odyssey reflects the precarious state of the U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP), which NSF manages. Losing the Palmer, which NSF said it could no longer afford, comes only a year after NSF ended its lease for the ARSV Laurence Gould, which did double duty as a supply ship to NSF’s Palmer Station as well as hosting research cruises. The belt-tightening in its $559 million Office of Polar Programs, which supports science and logistics in both the Arctic and Antarctic, has already led to downsizing and cancellations of long-running programs. Many more would be imperiled under President Donald Trump’s plan to slash NSF’s overall $9 billion budget to $4 billion in 2026.
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Antarctic scientists say abandoning the Palmer, a mainstay of Antarctic research since 1992, is a big step in the wrong direction. “Access is the biggest barrier to doing Antarctic science, and losing the Palmer will mean less access,” says Oscar Schofield, a biological oceanographer at Rutgers University who leads a long-running NSF-funded ecological monitoring project on the Antarctic Peninsula that was also scheduled to sail on the Palmer this winter. Instead, the Palmer completed its last cruise for NSF this month and reverted to its owner, Offshore Service Vessels.
NSF, which is currently closed because of the government shutdown, said in a 9 September posting it “plans to continue supporting the entire portfolio of marine cruise projects planned for the 2025-2026 field season … using the U.S. Academic Research Fleet, supported by University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) operators.”
The agency’s decision to turn to UNOLS’s 17-vessel fleet came as a surprise to Doug Russell, executive secretary for UNOLS. “I had no inkling of this,” he says. Russell says NSF officials told him they needed to use UNOLS vessels because “we have important science programs to be covered down in Antarctica.”
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So far, NSF has kept its word by finding alternative rides for scientists who expected to be aboard the Palmer. And polar scientists seem willing to cut NSF some slack. “I think [canceling the Palmer lease] was shortsighted,” says Julia Wellner, a marine geologist at the University of Houston who helped draft a 28 July petition signed by more than 200 scientists asking NSF to rethink its decision. “But NSF is caught between a rock and a hard place, and they’re doing their best to keep the program going.”
Even so, those new arrangements are only a short-term solution. Unlike the Palmer, which was based in Punta Arenas, Chile, the home ports of the replacement ships are thousands of kilometers away, forcing long voyages at daily operating rates of $75,000 or higher. And the ships are not available for other cruises during those weeks at sea.
In addition, the two ships that have so far taken on work scheduled for the Palmer–the RV Sikuliaq and the RV Roger Revelle–are in many ways less well suited for Antarctic cruises. The Sikuliaq has fewer berths for scientists, a shorter cruise range, and a less robust ice-breaking capacity than the larger Palmer. And although the Revelle is similar in size to the Palmer, it has never operated as far south as Antarctica and will have to maneuver around any ice hazards. Researchers aboard both ships might be forced to revise or abandon some expedition objectives if they encounter heavy ice.
Given such constraints, is the ship shuffling “really cheaper than maintaining an Antarctic research presence?” wonders Margaret Mars Brisbin, a biological oceanographer at the University of South Florida who, like Tobin, had her cruise switched to the Sikuliaq. “Sharing ships is going to really diminish the capacity of the U.S. polar program in general and make us less competitive with the rest of the world,” she adds.
The upheaval has taken a toll, she and others say. NSF initially told Mars Brisbin that her upcoming cruise to measure how changing ice melt patterns affect phytoplankton growth and carbon emissions from the ocean was canceled and that she might even have to resubmit her proposal. Then, after getting the good news that she and her colleagues would be using the Sikuliaq, but departing much earlier in the season, they had to race to meet a 2-week deadline for a long list of logistical, medical, and paperwork requirements that usually take months to complete.
“Our cruise was going to be a month later than [Schofield’s] and we were going to use some of their equipment,” Mars Brisbin says. “But now they are happening at the same time, so we’ve had to hunt for replacements.”
Schofield also had to scramble. “At first NSF put us on the Sikuliaq,” Schofield says. “But it would have meant fewer people and a shorter cruise than the 8 weeks from dock to dock. It was also later in the season, which would have skewed the time series we’ve been collecting. So NSF decided to go with the Revelle, which is a much better fit for us.”
Although Wellner applauds NSF for finding other ships for her colleagues, she worries their science could suffer because of the rushed preparations. “We think about every little thing on a ship, like what type of winch will be deploying our gear over the side,” she says.
In addition to ships, many Antarctic scientists rely on remote sensing and satellite data from an NSF-funded Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota to pinpoint and collect data on their research locations. But this year the center, which provides such information free to any USAP-funded researcher, felt the ripple effects of NSF’s looming budget crisis.
In May, after its application for a 5-year renewal had been stalled for more than a year, the center suspended accepting new requests for data. Shortly after, it laid off three of its 11 staffers. In August, the center received funding for another 5 years, but at roughly two-thirds of its previous operating level.
Ironically, some Arctic scientists wonder whether NSF’s efforts to keep Antarctic science afloat are coming at their expense. Audrey Taylor, executive director of the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States (ARCUS) says assigning double duty to the Sikuliaq suggests Antarctica will get more than its share of whatever NSF allocates for polar science. ARCUS, whose $9 million NSF grant to build scientific networks and strengthen ties with Indigenous communities expires in early 2026, was preparing to compete for a new NSF-funded Arctic communications hub. But earlier this year, NSF decided not to fund the hub. Without any prospect of NSF support, ARCUS folded its tent on 30 September.
For his part, Tobin is content to have a way to get to Seymour Island, which offers an easily accessible fossil record of climate shifts following the impact of the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Although he’s made four previous trips to Antarctica aboard the Palmer and the Gould, Tobin also carries out summer digs in Wyoming and Montana. “I could never spend all of my time doing polar research,” he says, “because you never know when you’ll be able to go down there.”
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