US climate research in Greenland declines as Summit station prioritises construction

US climate research at Greenland’s Summit station is declining as resources are increasingly directed towards logistics and construction, DR reports. Danish ice core researcher Jørgen Peder Steffensen says the development is a warning to the Kingdom of Denmark and Europe.

Summit station lies about 30 kilometres west of the summit of the Greenland ice sheet. According to Steffensen, scientific activity there has fallen as large amounts of funding have been tied up in logistics.

“The scientific activity at Summit has definitely declined because a great deal of money has been locked into logistics,” said Steffensen, a professor at the Niels Bohr Institute’s Department of Ice, Climate and Geophysics at the University of Copenhagen.

The logistics involve building a new station to support research. However, Steffensen said the reconstruction has become so dominant that scientific work has been pushed into the background.

He views the project as a political signal that the United States wants to demonstrate that it is present in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet.

“It has become less important to conduct science at Summit and more important to build up the station,” he said.

A report from Arctic Hub in Greenland shows that the number of US research publications about Greenland fell by 23 per cent between 2015 and 2024. The decline means Canada overtook the United States as the country that published the most research articles about Greenland in 2024.

The fall was particularly clear in the physical sciences from 2021 onwards. US publications relating to climate change in Greenland fell by 32 per cent, according to the report.

Steffensen said the United States remains an important partner because of its capacity to support research in Greenland. The US population is about 10 times larger than Canada’s, he said, meaning Canada cannot contribute on the same scale if the United States withdraws from the field.

Steffensen has spent many years analysing ice cores from the Greenland ice sheet. He described the United States as an important partner in transporting ice core researchers, including scientists from the Niels Bohr Institute, to the ice sheet.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration withdrew its support for an annual report on environmental changes in the Arctic produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The report had provided researchers and the public with updates on Arctic environmental conditions since 2006.

The Guardian has reported that the administration has also withdrawn support for scientific research referring to climate, including work at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

The US National Science Foundation funds Summit station. According to Steffensen, it has spent large sums in recent years flying steel structures and other equipment to the ice sheet to build the new station.

As a result, little capacity remains for scientific activity because almost all transport and personnel resources are being used for the reconstruction, he said.

Some of the research at Summit involves atmospheric studies. A neutrino observatory is also being built there, Steffensen said. Neutrinos are sometimes called the universe’s ghost particles because they are almost invisible and can pass through all materials.

The United States has also helped Danish researchers by providing transport to the ice sheet. Its specialised Hercules aircraft have skis that allow them to land deep on the ice sheet, enabling researchers to drill ice cores.

By drilling two to three kilometres into the ice sheet and extracting a long core of ice and old snow, scientists can study past climate conditions. The material can help determine the temperature in the cloud from which the snow fell.

Researchers have developed a Greenland climate record covering the past 120,000 to 125,000 years, including the last ice age and the preceding interglacial period. The Greenland ice core record is used worldwide as a reference for studying earlier climate changes.