In the Trump era of America first, scientists fear for the future of Antarctica

Nearly 4000 kilometres due south of Perth lies Casey Station, one of three Australian research stations on the Antarctic continent and the closest to Australia.

When Professor Nerilie Abram, now chief scientist of the Australian Antarctic Division, first visited Casey in 2013-14, several scientific projects used the sea ice as a platform to study the marine environment.

When she was last there, in the 2023-24 summer, it was a very different place.

“With that really rapid loss of Antarctic sea ice, those places that a decade earlier we would have happily travelled down onto and worked from the sea ice, are now bays that are free of sea ice,” Abram says.

The swiftly changing Antarctic climate and its implications for Australia and the world is one of the reasons that the Australian government announced in December a $208.8 million increase in funding for the Australian Antarctic Division over seven years.

The boost comes as the Trump administration is pulling back from climate research, including in Antarctica, while other countries including China, South Korea, Britain, Germany and New Zealand are expanding efforts.

Environment Minister Murray Watt says the Albanese government has spent $1.7 billion in Antarctic operations since the 2022 election.

“Antarctica has great geostrategic importance to Australia, especially at a time when several countries are increasing their presence in the region,” he says. “Investing in Antarctic science gives us influence over its future. Critical Australian-led science gives us the knowledge we need to protect Antarctica and understand our changing climate and its impacts on the wider Australian economy and our communities.”

Other human activity is also increasing in the frozen continent, from industrial krill fishing and mass tourism that reached 125,000 visitors last year to military research and development and mining exploration under the guise of science.

There are growing fears the Cold War-era Antarctic Treaty that has protected the last great wilderness for nearly 70 years may not hold in the 21st century as the old rules-based international order disintegrates along with the sea ice.

Dr Elizabeth Buchanan, a senior fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and a polar geopolitics expert, says the laws and frameworks governing Antarctica are not “consistent with contemporary geopolitical pressures”.

“There are problems on the horizon,” Buchanan says. “We don’t have a Plan B for when the treaty might fail or a state might unilaterally exit the treaty.”

Research priorities

The AAD’s budget boost, Abram says, will underpin an expansion of voyages by the flagship research vessel Nuyina, which is currently funded for 200 days a year at sea. That will increase by another 30 days next summer and a further 60 days in both of the following two years. The funding also expands Australia’s Antarctic aviation capacity.

Abram says the science priorities for her team include understanding climate change impacts in Antarctica and the way its climate affects other parts of the world, including Australia. Other areas of focus include studying the biodiversity of Antarctica, the Southern Ocean and the southern Antarctic islands, and understanding and minimising human impacts.

Abram and her colleagues are still designing the extra voyages, but she says there will be one to study sea ice changes and one to look at krill – a tiny crustacean eaten by animals such as whales, seals, seabirds and penguins and that she describes as the “cornerstone of biodiversity in the Southern Ocean”.

What happens in Antarctica affects the rest of the world, and there is no better example of that than sea ice. In Antarctica, Abram says, it is a buffer for protecting the ice on the continent from storms and waves and it is ecologically important, including as a nursery for krill.

Sea ice also affects weather, not just in Antarctica but globally, and how the ocean circulates and moves water from the surface to the depths, taking carbon and oxygen with it. The loss of sea ice also creates a “feedback loop” that makes climate change worse because an expanse of white ice reflects the sun’s energy back into space, while dark ocean absorbs the heat and contributes to further warming.

The AAD has led work on the melting of the Denman Glacier, which has a vast store of frozen freshwater in a deep canyon and is also acting as a plug to prevent the draining of the entire ice basin, which has a surface area of 265 million square kilometres. The Denman system alone contains enough ice to raise sea levels by 1.5 metres globally if it melts completely, though it would take centuries.

“If you were to take all of the ice on top of Antarctica and move that from being on Antarctica into the ocean, you would raise sea levels by 58 metres,” Abram says. “The world would be very different. Fortunately, a lot of that isn’t going to move any time soon, but there are places where parts of that ice is potentially very unstable.”

While the Australians have focused on Denman, the US has been leading research of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, which contains enough ice to raise sea levels by three metres.

Antarctica is a big place, Abram says, and scientists rely on international co-operation to cover it all.

Australia collaborated closely with the French on last year’s mission to drill an ice core containing more than a one million-year record of Earth’s climate and atmospheric composition, Abram says. Other international partners include New Zealand, Japan and South Korea.

The past three years were the hottest on record globally, and this acceleration of climate change means Antarctica has never been more important for scientific study.

Trump’s war on climate science

Yet the hurdles to Antarctic research are increasing. The Trump administration has been cutting funds for climate science, and that includes much of the work it does in Antarctica.

The Trump administration proposed a 57 per cent decrease in funding for the National Science Foundation, which funds most of the pure polar science. However, NBC News reported this week that Congress approved a bill that gave NSF a 3.4 per cent cut.

In December, the NSF announced it would terminate the lease on the Nathaniel B. Palmer, the icebreaker used by the US Antarctic Program. The Washington Post reported that the ship returned to Louisiana in November without a replacement lined up.

Trump has also said the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado will be dismantled.

The NASA National Snow and Ice Data Centre is poised to cut off access to data from its defence meteorological satellites, ending the best and most longstanding climate datasets for sea ice cover and threatening the work of scientists globally, including at the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership.

The researchers were originally told the data access would end mid-last year. Dr Edward Doddridge, a physical oceanographer at AAPP, says it was later extended to October this year, and he did not expect a further extension given the age of the satellite. NASA scientists are working to integrate data from Japanese satellites to ensure a continuous dataset.

Closer to home, Doddridge says Antarctic scientists are still waiting to understand the impact of the 350 full-time equivalent job cuts announced at CSIRO. Up to 150 are to come from the environmental research unit, which includes ocean, atmosphere and climate researchers.

Doddridge says the CSIRO has historically excelled at long-term climate measurements, whereas university researchers have struggled.

“We’re spending more of our time worrying about just getting the data that we need, rather than doing the science that we need to do to understand it,” Doddridge says. “Every time there’s another announcement about this satellite data feed stopping or the funding for that program stopping, the community has a scramble.”

A CSIRO spokesman says the agency will keep the vast majority of its climate-related research, including modelling and Antarctic research, but that it will have a renewed focus on adaptation and mitigation.

CSIRO’s research vessel Investigator is currently in East Antarctica and has two more Antarctic voyages scheduled, in late 2026 and early 2027.

”Antarctica remains an important region for science and Australia, and CSIRO’s research will continue to include work in this area,” the spokesman says.

Increasing international interest

Even as the US has cut back, other countries have expanded their presence, research budgets and maritime capabilities, including Japan, South Korea and New Zealand.

Last year, India approved the construction of Maitri II, its fourth Antarctic research base, and ordered its own polar research vessel to be built by a Norwegian firm.

China’s fifth Antarctic base, Quinling Station, on Inexpressible Island, in the Ross Sea, reached full operational capacity this month. China expects to complete its sixth station on an unclaimed portion of the continent in 2027.

Russia opened the massive Vostok Station in January 2024, replacing the Soviet-era facility of the same name, and it reached full operational capacity last year. Last March, the Kremlin announced it would also reopen a number of shuttered stations on the continent.

China has now overtaken the US to be the world’s largest producer of scientific papers on Antarctica, mirroring a trend in science more generally, according to a recent report co-authored by scientists at the University of Tasmania. Britain is third, followed by Australia and Germany.

The Antarctic Research Trends Report 2025 published by the Arctic Centre at Umeå University in Sweden examined the quantity and quality (judged by journal ranking) of scientific publications on Antarctic and Southern Ocean topics from 2016 to 2024, with a particular focus on the past three years.

They found the number of publications peaked in 2021 and declined slightly each year since in every country except China. They also found that international collaboration was high, though markedly less so for researchers from China, Russia and India.

Resource exploitation

Antarctica is governed by the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which says that all human activity on the continent has to be for the humanitarian quest for science. However, it is loosely worded and a lot of research can have a dual scientific and military purpose, Buchanan says. For example, Antarctica is a good place to study space because the view is so clear with little thermal interference.

The biggest commercial activity in Antarctica is krill fishing, which is governed by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources.

Every summer, a fleet of huge trawlers descends on Antarctica to suck up huge amounts of krill. Sea Shepherd International, which sends its flagship every summer to observe the krill fishing, says the krill oil is turned into Omega-3 supplements and food additives for humans, pets, livestock and aquaculture.

Until recently, there was an international agreement to spread out the krill fishing to minimise the ecological impact, but that expired at the end of the 2024 season and efforts to extend it were blocked mainly by China and Russia.

Last year, the fishery shut down several months early after reaching the 620,000 tonne catch limit for the first time in history. Norway has been pushing to increase catch limits, Buchanan says, and another Chinese super-trawler joined the fleet of now 15 ships this summer.

Since 2018, there has been an international push to create a marine protected area in the area where the krill fishing is concentrated, but it has been thwarted by the need for consensus.

The last big change to the treaty was in the 1990s, when mining was banned under the Madrid Protocol. This cannot be renegotiated until 2048 and even then, any changes would need to be unanimous, which Buchanan says is extremely unlikely, though countries could unilaterally ignore or leave the treaty.

Private gas firm Novatek funded and built the new Vostok Station, in what Buchanan says could be the first of a trend for energy firms to bankroll Antarctic development, and one of Russia’s main activities is mapping Antarctica for resources such as oil, gas and critical minerals. (She also says this was also the primary scientific focus of the US and Australia until the 1980s, a strategy abandoned in favour of pushing for conservation in part because resource exploitation was uneconomic under the technology of the time).

Global commitments to reach net zero by 2050 may signify a shift away from oil. Assuming demand continues, Buchanan says Arctic oil would not be exploited until the 2040s and Antarctica even further into the future due to the logistical challenges.

“This is all about the decadal strategic thinking of Beijing and Moscow that is completely different and foreign to our Western conception of strategy,” she says. “We think of the next 10 years, but they’re thinking of the next 40 or 50 years.”

Trump’s vision

Buchanan says it would be a mistake to see the Trump cuts to climate science as a sign of a US retreat from Antarctica in a geopolitical sense. The Nathaniel B. Palmer was an ageing vessel, she says, but the US Coast Guard maintains several icebreakers.

“I don’t think it’s correct to say that the funding has been completely capped. It’s just been put through the Trump-first lens, that America-first agenda,” Buchanan says. “It’s more of a recalibration.”

While US President Donald Trump has not made Antarctica a regular talking point like with Greenland and the Arctic, he has shifted the rhetoric from scientific stewardship to strategic competition. He has spoken about expanding the icebreaker fleet to prevent “total surrender” of both poles and he has positioned Antarctica as the “southern anchor” of the Western hemisphere.

Buchanan believes that over the next six to 12 months, the US will harden its posture on Antarctica with the aim of being able to stake an enforceable claim at a later point. The US has never recognised any territorial rights in Antarctica, including Australia’s claim to 42 per cent of the continent.

“It’s going to be a bit of a wake-up call, not only for US competitors over Antarctica, China and Russia, but also for allies like Australia who have long looked to the US as a stabilising force in Antarctica,” she says. “That might not be the case any more.”

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