Federal Budget Cutbacks Leave Antarctica Researchers Out in the Cold

Long before the first Air Force plane roars low through the Antarctic darkness, the scientists isolated in the stations below dream of its cargo.

Crates of ripe strawberries and bananas. Girl Scout Thin Mints. Sports videos. Scented letters from home.

The researchers imagine setting aside their telescopes and ice instruments. Retreating to privacy. Unfolding their kids’ crayon drawings.

“Everyone is buzzed with electricity,” said South Pole technician Christopher Bero of the June airdrop, which has showered fresh vegetables and fruits, packages from home and supplies on remote Antarctic outposts each of the last 11 winters. “It is Christmas in June.”

But Christmas isn’t coming this year to the South Pole, where winter plunges to 117 below zero during the Northern Hemisphere’s summer. The airdrop has been scrapped, deemed a $1-million luxury by officials trying to avert bigger cuts in the National Science Foundation’s overall $3.2-billion budget.

No Americans are going hungry in Antarctic bases, where warehouses brim with frozen, canned and dried goods. But the cancellation has hit an emotional nerve among the dozen researchers and 248 support people holed up in Antarctica during the long winter, which runs from February to October at the South Pole, and to August at McMurdo Station, about 800 miles away.

The scrapped airdrop, moreover, may be a taste of deeper cuts to come in a U.S. program that has attracted bright scientists for four decades, studying everything from cosmic radiation of the big bang to polar ice sheet changes that may presage global warming.

It reflects the struggle by federal agencies, particularly those with social and scientific missions, to balance cost-cutting edicts against humane considerations.

Several Antarctic members, corresponding through the Internet, spoke candidly of how the airdrop relieved their isolation inside dormitories and laboratories during the winter months, four of them without sunrises.

Loneliness crept in, they said, despite their access to activities from volleyball to weightlifting, electronic mail and telephone communications, and fresh lettuce at least once a week supplied by hydroponic gardens.

“We try to tell ourselves that without the airdrop, we won’t go into that slump, but we know it’s bull,” Bero messaged from the South Pole.

The University of Chicago researcher, staying up late to baby-sit a telescope, nurse a Dewar’s and compose e-mail, lives with 25 others under the South Pole station’s 20-year-old aluminum dome.

“Will no airdrop this winter adversely affect the crew morale? Yes, it will,” he said. “I don’t really know to what extent it will change us, or more appropriately, not change us.”

He and others recalled their excitement as more than a dozen 4-foot square crates would parachute from the fuselage of a C-141 cargo plane, strobe lights flickering in the snow. The staff would rush out to collect their loot with flashlights before the fresh produce could freeze.

Last year, more than 66,000 pounds of supplies, ranging from 90 dozen eggs to pigs’ feet, were dropped for Americans at McMurdo Station, New Zealanders at Scott Base, and scientists and support staff from various nations at Amundsen-Scott South Pole station.

“Reading e-mail is just not the same as seeing, feeling--in some cases, for the lucky ones, smelling--a written letter,” messaged Kerry Vigue, the sole electrician at the South Pole between now and October.

Edward Finn, manager of McMurdo Station, located on Ross Island off the coast, said the airdrop spurred a camaraderie among the 233 winter staffers, mostly support and maintenance personnel.

“Those who do not receive any mail are given packages made up from the material that other people received on the ‘drop,’ ” he said.

But the excitement doesn’t last long. Right after the airdrop, “almost everyone hits an emotional slump,” Bero said. “It’s as though the airdrop signals to people that this is where the winter should have ended, but hasn’t.”

The event is even more cherished than the supplies. Nancy Marie Tanner, the South Pole’s winter cook, said bulging stockpiles enable her to make special meals for crew members who are “missing something that their mom or loved one used to make them.”

Tanner mixes in greenhouse herbs and vegetables to create exotic meals featuring tamales with corn husks from Mexico, Thai steamed custard in a pumpkin, Cajun shrimp and Cornish game hen in a plum sauce.

“We have corn every now and again, but I assure you it doesn’t come out of a can,” she said.

“My meals are varied, from down-home cookin’ to ‘global gumbo.’ We have people here from all over the world, which makes it exciting to try new things.”

The airdrop’s fate was sealed last year when the Air Force, facing budget cuts, said it would stop contributing its customary three-quarters of the $1-million annual cost. The news came as the National Science Foundation, the main federal agency funding U.S. Antarctic programs, was struggling with a 3% reduction in the Antarctic budget to $190.6 million this year.

Within seven years the Antarctic budget, along with other federally funded science and technology programs, could fall by a third as Congress concocts new ways to balance the federal budget, said Cornelius Sullivan, director of polar programs at the National Science Foundation.

Already, cutbacks have delayed badly needed repairs in the South Pole station, including replacing its geodesic dome, a symbol since 1975 of America’s presence at the bottom of the world.

Sullivan said the cutbacks also mean the number of federally funded studies could drop next year, jeopardizing major research areas ranging from glaciology to astral physics.

The South Pole is ideal for astronomy and atmospheric science, and serves as a bellwether of environmental change, including the infamous ozone hole above the Antarctic. It also is excellent for studying how organisms adapt and ecosystems function in simple and extreme environments.

For their part, some lawmakers suggest the Antarctica program may have outlived its usefulness in the post-Cold War, staking science and territory in a race against a Soviet Union that no longer exists. Moreover, maintaining and supplying facilities and equipment in the Antarctic is costly because of its extreme climate and remoteness.

Such geopolitical questions, though, fade against the reality just now sinking in among those wintering in Antarctica.

The researchers and support staff knew late last year that the airdrop would likely be canceled, and could have opted out of the winter shift.

No one did. Indeed, some crew members agreed the airdrop seemed a luxury amid fiscal restraint. Besides, they were told, any major medical or supply emergencies would be answered with a fly-in regardless of cost. (Because of the extreme temperatures, pilots prefer airdrops because plane engines are tough to restart once they land.)

But, if someone runs out of widgets, it could hurt the research, said Bero, who monitors wind, light waves and other conditions that influence telescope performance. “I know that there will be at least one experiment on base that doesn’t work this winter because something broke, or somebody ran out of something,” he said.

Time to ponder life in Antarctica, though, is one thing its inhabitants have plenty of.

“My summer is colder than most of the Earth’s winter,” Bero said. “My world is mostly ice, steel, aluminum and Teflon. Teflon is one of the few plastics that can withstand the [minus] 100 F weather without shattering into fine particles . . .

“So we watch videos, sometimes the same video 20 times over just to be cruel to our brains.”

They get drunk, read novels and develop hobbies, from studying foreign languages on tape to playing guitars. They try to stay busy with their jobs.

“Eventually, though, we realize that we are only trying to escape reality,” Bero said. “So many of us embrace that reality of our utter isolation and hope that we will be struck by some great epiphany.

“But the only revelation we have is how much we miss our families, our friends, and just hanging out all night at some coffeehouse or diner.

”. . . This is where the airdrop comes in.”