Welcome back, federal workers! Look how we screwed up your research

http://grist.org/news/welcome-back-federal-workers-look-how-we-screwed-up-your-research/

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Here’s hoping that federal researchers enjoy catching up on weeks of missed work.


Hooray! Congress has given the federal government permission to begin functioning again. National parks and monuments are reopening and the National Zoo’s panda cam is back. But after a 16-day hiatus, which by one estimate cost the country up to $24 billion, there have been painful impacts on scientific research — including research that could help tell us WTF is going on with the climate.

The most-discussed climate-science impacts from the shutdown have been those affecting studies in Antarctica, where a narrow annual research window is approaching. From Politico:

In Antarctica, scientists who study the Adelie penguin worry that they won’t be in place when the fast-declining species arrives later this year at its nesting and breeding grounds. “If we have breaks in that record, there are a lot of scientific statistical analysis of our observations that we can’t do. And so in our case, these data, the observations are all just gone forever. We never get them back,” said Hugh Ducklow, an oceanographer and professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.


Ducklow said he’ll be waiting for the NSF to provide guidance in the coming days on how it plans to reopen and what that means for field researchers. With the South Pole summer season limiting his window, though, he’s worried that time is short. “I’m optimistic we will resume our season, ideally within a few weeks,” he said. “If we delay much into November, we start to incur irreparable losses.”