We’re all aware that high gasoline prices have caused people to cut back on planned trips and redo household budgets. Research communities, especially those involved in Arctic and Antarctic expeditions, have to do the same thing. Such expeditions need fuel for airplanes, helicopters, and ships to reach sites in the polar regions. They depend on their sponsors to dispatch tankers of fuel and draw on those supplies for their survival and the work of the mission.

According to an article in the July 2, 2008, Chronicle of Higher Education, the National Science Foundation (NSF) sends six million gallons of fuel a year to McMurdo Station in Antarctica for distribution to two other permanent bases and the temporary research camps. In a year the price has gone up 60 percent. The ships that break ice, making it possible for the fuel tankers to reach stations, are themselves using vast amounts of gasoline—6,800 gallons per day while they are cruising as oceanographic laboratories, 9,000 gallons a day when they are working as icebreakers. While the cost per gallon to NSF is slightly less than the rising prices the public must pay, the research group predicts it will have to pay over $4 per gallon in 2009.

One Antarctic expedition that is threatened, according to the Chronicle article, holds great promise for unlocking the oldest climate record on the earth. Four countries planned to set up a camp deep in the interior of Antarctica to survey the Gamburtsev mountain range, which is the size of the Alps and buried under ice. Two survey aircraft would sweep back and forth over the ice to map the hidden mountains. The United States was to provide fuel for the planes but now has to reconsider the price of flying the gas to the remote location.

A program manager for NSF warns there may be a 25 percent cut in the number of new programs in the Arctic. A geophysicist whose proposal for investigating ice-sheet melting in Greenland was rejected after she couldn’t cut her budget is quoted as saying: “Maybe we could have made it [budget cutting] if fuel cost hadn’t gone crazy.”