Enlarge (credit: Jean Varner, National Science Foundation )

The US National Science Foundation is one of the US’s primary means of supporting fundamental scientific research—its investments account for about 25 percent of federal support to America's colleges and universities for basic research, or research driven by curiosity and discovery. But NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan has asked Ars for the opportunity to explain how the unique facilities that NSF supports in the Antarctic have value for both commercial interests and national security. In making this argument, he’s joined by Representative Tony Gonzales of Texas, who explains how NSF’s Antarctic research has had direct impacts on people in his district.

Antarctica's geopolitical significance is understated. US involvement in Antarctica is a strategic necessity for scientific advancement, engineering breakthroughs, educational opportunities, and national security.

Today, global competition is fiercer than ever. For our nation to maintain global competitiveness in an era of shifting geopolitical power dynamics—notably where China seeks to expand its global influence—we must support the critical science and engineering research efforts happening at the bottom of our planet. While seven nations claim territories across the Antarctic continent, the US recognizes none and claims none, in full alignment with the Antarctic Treaty. The US, with the world's most significant and influential presence in Antarctica, leads cooperatively to ensure interagency and international partnerships can succeed in everything from science to security.

Enlarge / 2023 has been a remarkable year for Antarctic sea ice. (credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center )

Sometimes, data points deemed to be “outliers” are met with suspicion—possibly the result of an error in the measuring process, for example. But outliers can also represent a puzzling thing that really happened. This year’s floating sea ice cover around Antarctica falls into that latter category.

On September 25, the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) published preliminary dates and numbers for the annual maximum sea ice coverage in the Antarctic and minimum coverage in the Arctic. With the last few days of September in the books, NSIDC noted Wednesday that those determinations have held.

Arctic sea ice

Arctic sea ice coverage hit its end-of-summer low point on September 19, the sixth lowest in the satellite record that started in 1979. The average across all of September was fifth lowest. The record is still held by an unusual 2012 season, but sea ice is steadily declining over time.

Enlarge / Blood Falls seeps from the end of the Taylor Glacier into Lake Bonney. Scientists believe a buried saltwater reservoir is partly responsible for the discoloration, which is a form of reduced iron. (credit: NSF/Peter Rejcek/Public domain)

In 1911, an Australian geologist named Thomas Griffith Taylor was exploring a valley in Antarctica when he stumbled upon a strange waterfall. The meltwater flowing from beneath the glacier that now bears Taylor's name turns a deep red upon coming into contact with the air, earning the site the moniker "Blood Falls." Various hypotheses have been proposed over the last century to explain the strange phenomenon. A team of scientists now thinks they've finally found the answer: tiny nanospheres rich in iron, silica, calcium, aluminum, and sodium, among other elements.

But why has solving this mystery taken more than a century? It seems the nanospheres are amorphous materials, meaning they lack a crystalline structure and hence eluded prior analytical methods looking for minerals because they are not, technically, minerals, according to a recent paper published in the journal Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Science. That might seem like an odd choice of journal for this study, but the Blood Falls at Taylor Glacier is a so-called "analogue" site for astrobiologists and planetary scientists keen to learn more about how life might evolve and thrive in similar inhospitable environments elsewhere in the universe.

"With the advent of the Mars Rover missions, there was an interest in trying to analyze the solids that came out of the waters of Blood Falls as if it was a Martian landing site," said co-author Ken Livi of Johns Hopkins University. "What would happen if a Mars Rover landed in Antarctica? Would it be able to determine what was causing the Blood Falls to be red? It's a fascinating question and one that several researchers were considering."

Enlarge / Iceberg A-74 calved from Antarctica's Brunt Ice Shelf in February 2021. (credit: Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2021 )

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Research scientists on ships along Antarctica’s west coast said their recent voyages have been marked by an eerily warm ocean and record-low sea ice coverage—extreme climate conditions, even compared to the big changes of recent decades, when the region warmed much faster than the global average.

Despite “that extraordinary change, what we’ve seen this year is dramatic,” said University of Delaware oceanographer Carlos Moffat last week from Punta Arenas, Chile, after completing a research cruise aboard the RV Laurence M. Gould to collect data on penguin feeding, as well as on ice and oceans as chief scientist for the Palmer Long Term Ecological Research program .

Enlarge / Personal tents for staff at the Shackleton Glacier science camp, situated on the Shackleton Glacier in the Transantarctic mountains of Antarctica. (credit: Jeff Miller via Getty Images )

In September 2022, two months before Ph.D. student Megan Kerr was scheduled to board a military plane bound for the Antarctic ice sheet, she found herself in a conference room on Oregon State University’s campus, waiting to ask a question that had been nagging her for weeks. She sat intently through a presentation from the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs. Then, she raised her hand. The room full of graduate students turned in their chairs.

“This NSF report about all the sexual harassment that’s going on in the field,” she said. “What is the NSF going to be doing in the short term, also long term, about that?” Because “a lot of us are going into the field in like, two months.”

These students and about a hundred other researchers from roughly a dozen institutions had gathered at Oregon State University to kick off COLDEX , a 5-year, $25 million-dollar paleoclimatology project tasked by the NSF, the federal science agency, to find and drill a core of Earth’s oldest ice in Antarctica.

Enlarge / The Venturi Antarctica has been operating down south since late 2021. (credit: Venturi)

The Antarctic's only electric exploration vehicle has received an upgrade for 2023. Called the Venturi Antarctica, it's a bright-orange tracked vehicle that has been in service at Belgium's Princess Elisabeth Antarctica Station since December 2021, allowing researchers there to travel around East Antarctica without belching hydrocarbon pollutants all over the place.

It's 11.4-feet (3.4 m) long, 6.6-feet (2 m) wide, and 7.2-feet (2.2 m) tall, and it weighs 5,500 lbs (2.5 metric tons). The Antarctica's tracks are powered by a pair of 80 hp (60 kW) electric motors, which are fed by a 52.6 kWh battery pack that gives the vehicle a range of 31 miles (50 km) in temperatures as low as -58˚F (-50˚C). For longer trips, it can fit a second pack to extend that range. So far, the Antarctica has about 310 miles (500 km) under its tracks.

Ars got its first glimpse of the Antarctica in 2016 during our visit to Venturi's Monegasque HQ . (credit: Elle Cayabyab Gitlin)

The pod-like cabin also has room for equipment—it would be a pretty useless research vehicle if it didn't—and it can carry up to six humans as well. Charging takes 2–18 hours, depending on the conditions, and the electricity comes from Princess Elisabeth Station's wind and solar capacity.

Enlarge (credit: De Agostini Picture Library | Getty Images)

Lake Whillans is a strange body of water, starting with the fact that there is liquid to fill it at all. Though buried under more than 2,000 feet of Antarctic ice, its temperatures climb to just shy of 0° Celsius, thanks to a combination of geothermal warmth, intense friction from ice scraping rock, and that thick glacial blanket protecting it from the polar air. Given the immense pressure down there, that’s just balmy enough to keep the lake’s water watery. Stranger still, Lake Whillans is also teeming with life. One survey a decade ago found thousands of varieties of microscopic critters, thought to be feeding on nutrients left by seawater that sloshed into the basin several millennia ago, when the glaciers last pulled back.

More recently, Chloe Gustafson, a geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, arrived on the remote stretch of ice above Lake Whillans with a different mystery in mind: What’s happening underneath that lake? Antarctic researchers had long suspected the plumbing below the glacier went much deeper than they could see. Any groundwater beneath the lake would have implications for how the ice up above moves oceanward, and thus for how quickly it might contribute to rising seas . But they couldn’t definitively prove what groundwater was there. It was too deep, too ice-covered to map with the traditional tools of glaciology, like bouncing radar signals off the ice or setting off explosives and listening to the shockwaves .