U.S. Scientists in Greenland Want Trump to Back Off

Faced with both funding cuts and presidential imperial ambitions that threaten their research, researchers are getting political.

Each summer, about 300 American scientists—mostly climate scientists, with a smattering of biologists and geologists—make the long trip up to Greenland to do fieldwork. These scientists are usually funded by the National Science Foundation, a federal grant-making body. And because of that, they get free transportation for the thousand-mile journey, courtesy of the only other significant group of Americans in Greenland: the U.S. military.

President Trump’s threats to annex Greenland, some American climatologists say, could imperil the climate change research they’ve spent decades building. A growing number of those scientists are now stepping into the public sphere and organizing to save their work and support their Greenlandic collaborators. But they’re up against an administration intent on stripping away the funding they need to do their work—and the American populace whose hearts and minds they’re trying to sway have little familiarity with the territory. Very few outside the scientific and military worlds have actually been there.

Mia Tuccillo, a Ph.D. student and climate scientist at Northwestern University, remembers her first trip to Greenland. “You walk up the ramp into this huge, open space,” Tuccillo said. She took a U.S. Air Mobility Command cargo plane up to Pituffik Space Base to study algae and cyanobacteria biomarkers. Though Tuccillo isn’t particularly comfortable flying in with the Air Force, she said, they tend to give her less trouble about her equipment than commercial airport security.

“TSA’s always like … ‘What is this?’” Tuccillo laughed. She travels with a coring apparatus: a long, serrated rod, a pipe in which to hold sediment—a big tube full of mud, to laypeople—and a “really heavy hammer that looks like a donut.” They don’t get it. The military........

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