For climate scientists, shutdown casts long shadow

http://grist.org/climate-energy/for-climate-scientists-shutdown-casts-long-shadow/

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Antarctic researcher Gretchen Hoffman, left, says consequences of the shutdown “could completely scuttle some projects.”

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One of those scientists was Gretchen Hofmann, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who published a column Friday in Nature about her frustration with the shutdown and its long-term impacts on basic research. As Hofmann and her peers stand by for word from NSF, we spoke to her about how some of the worst pain from the last two weeks could be felt by the next generation of up-and-coming scientists.

Q. What have the last couple weeks been like for you?

A. We have a research project that’s funded to study ocean conditions and ocean acidification in the Southern Ocean, the area around McMurdo Sound. That project was supposed to start Oct. 10, and we were going to deploy one of our field team members down there to go retrieve sensors from under the sea ice. The government shut down and we just sat there and thought, ‘Well, I guess she’s not going,’ and sure enough 24 hours before Lydia Kapsenberg, my grad student, was supposed to deploy, her travel was canceled. A week earlier, my post-doc Amanda Kelley, an NSF funded research fellow, was supposed to go down; she flew down there, landed on the sea ice, and literally was told that the station had gone into caretaker mode. So right away, right in my face, front row center, I had two junior scientists that were really heavily impacted by this. Not only because they stand to lose to data and progress in their careers; it was also really upsetting. I mean, they felt really threatened and jeopardized.

Q. You make the point that while there are impacts for everyone working down there, it’s especially a problem for young scientists, post-docs, and grad students. Explain why. What’s different about being in that position that makes a missed opportunity like this even more problematic?

A. The reason that it’s a sensitive life history stage is because, if we talk about Kelley, she’s a post-doc, and that’s kind of like being an apprentice electrician: You already have your license, in this case a PhD, and she now comes to work with me to really learn about how to be a scientist. During that time, these jobs are really competitive, and you need to be productive. By that I mean you need to do experiments, you need to publish papers, you need to go to science meetings and get out there. And with no data, with a canceled field season, she will not have that. And so that puts her back incredibly.