Russia shocked the world when it invaded Ukraine in late February. Images of civilians fleeing their homes, shattered bodies littering city streets, smoking apartment buildings and mass graves have flooded news and social media platforms since then. The war has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced another 14 million.
War is not fought in a vacuum.The knock-on effects of the Ukraine war, from soaring energy and food costs to Environmental damage and threat of nuclear catastrophe (SN: 7/2/22, p. 6; SN Online: 3/7/22), which is being felt globally — especially in two other crises, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and climate change.
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“The confluence of all these crises at the same time is very, very dangerous for the world,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in May.
We often turn to science for solutions to the world’s problems. But this tectonic shift in the geopolitical landscape has upended global scientific collaboration and left many researchers scrambling to find a firm footing. While the outcome of this change—like that of war itself—is uncertain, here are some examples of how the conflict affects scientists and their research.
Science in War Zone
Ukraine’s infrastructure has suffered massive damage since the invasion began. Hospitals, universities and research institutions have not been spared either.
George Gamota, an American physicist and adviser to Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences, said some scientists had sought asylum in other countries, while about half remained in Ukraine, with male researchers aged 18 to 60 expected to serve in the military Service. Gamota was born in Ukraine and immigrated to the United States as a child. He maintains close ties to his country of birth. When Ukraine became an independent country in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he helped advise Ukraine on building its scientific infrastructure.
“When Russia attacked Ukraine, everything went haywire. It really didn’t stabilize,” Gamota said.
Research funding in Ukraine has dropped by 50%, he said. Scientific institutions around the globe have stepped up to provide assistance through grants, job opportunities and resettlement programmes. But Gamota says that funding, whether from the Ukrainian government or independent groups, still takes a long time to reach scientists’ pockets. “Some people get nothing.”
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The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine is already envisioning how to rebuild. In September, the group met with European and American counterparts. Gamota said Latvia, Poland and elsewhere described how they were reorganized after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “It’s an exercise that I think is important. But what Ukrainians are probably looking for is how the world can help us right now.”
In March, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation donated $1 million to directly support Ukrainian researchers. The group donated an additional $2 million to rebuilding efforts in October, a move Gamota called “fantastic.”
physical and spatial deceleration
As the war dragged on, Ukraine’s scientific community struggled, while that of Russia grew increasingly isolated. Western countries’ sanctions directly or indirectly target Russia’s scientific enterprise.
In June, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced that the United States will “End” cooperation with Russia, following an earlier ban on the export of U.S. technology there. The policy applies to national laboratories, as well as federally funded projects involving universities and research institutions affiliated with the Russian government. Many research institutions in the West have also cut ties with Russian collaborators.
These measures have particularly affected some large-scale collaborations in space and physics research.
Had task delay and the temporary shutdown of at least one space telescope (SN: 26 Mar 22, p. 3. 6). However, the International Space Station, jointly operated by NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, is still operating normally.
In the field of high-energy physics research, the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva has announced that it will no longer update its international cooperation agreement Contracts with Russia and Belarus, which assisted in the Russian invasion, expire in 2024.
About 8% of CERN employees affiliated with Russian institutions (approximately 1,000 researchers) will not be able to use CERN facilities by then. Russia will stop providing resources for the experiment.
CERN Director General Fabiola Gianotti wrote in a memo to staff about the decision that the measures strongly condemn the invasion, “while leaving the door open for continued scientific collaboration in the future as conditions permit.” “.Until 2024, Russian and Belarusian scientists can continue their current cooperation, such as Atlas – One of the detectors that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012 as part of the ongoing search for theoretical particles including dark matter (SN: 7/2/22, p. 18). But new efforts are prohibited.
Science outside Ukraine and Russia has not escaped the economic impact of the geopolitical maelstrom.Rising energy costs as Russia cuts off gas exports drives up European research labs reassess their energy usejournal nature Reported in October. CERN is a major consumer, using energy equivalent to one-third of Geneva’s average annual energy consumption.
The lab ended its largest accelerator run two weeks early on Nov. 28 to reduce its load on the grid and prepare for price spikes and potential winter shortages. Competition among researchers for accelerator time intensifies as CERN officials announce fewer particle collisions in 2023 nature report.
The war has also put pressure on already crumbling global supply chains, causing shortages and shipping delays. The delays have hampered construction of ITER, the world’s largest nuclear fusion experiment, which is scheduled to open in France in 2025. “We’ve had our ups and downs with this project, and we’ll handle it,” said ITER spokeswoman Sabina Griffith. ITER has been expecting ring magnets and other equipment from Russia, a member of the European Union. and one of seven partners in the United States. Russia remains part of the project due to an intergovernmental contract. But for now, “everything is on hold,” Griffiths said.
Chilling effect on Arctic research
Northern Russia holds about two-thirds of the planet’s frozen or permafrost. Overall, the world’s permafrost holds almost twice as much carbon as there is in the atmosphere. Permafrost in the region is melting as temperatures in the Arctic rise almost four times faster than the global average.
By the end of the century, thawing soil could release hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methaneAccording to some estimates (SN Online: 9/25/19). To better understand how climate change is reshaping the Arctic, and vice versa, researchers need detailed measurements of permafrost carbon, temperature, microbial communities, and more.
But deteriorating relations between the West and Russia “make it very difficult to gather data so we can get the best picture of the entire Arctic,” says Ted Schuur, an ecologist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.Principal Investigator Permafrost carbon gridWith much of the permafrost in the Arctic now inaccessible, Schuur and his colleagues are looking for sites in North America and Europe that could serve as proxies for Russian permafrost, he said.
The terminated collaboration “while intended to ‘punish’ Russia, is actually affecting the global Arctic community by limiting researchers’ access to scientific information and undermining the resilience of Arctic (especially indigenous) communities,” said Nikolay Korchunov, Russia’s ambassador for Arctic affairs, wrote in an email new sciencesecond.
Korchunov chairs the Arctic Council, an eight-member intergovernmental body that oversees the region, forging agreements on oil spill cleanup, commerce, wildlife conservation, climate change research and more. In March, seven other members of the council — Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Norway and the United States — announced they were suspending cooperation with Russia.
Work continues between so-called “Arctic 7”. But Freeze Derails Russia’s Plans biodiversity– and Pollution-monitoring project, Korchunov said. “A cold scientific environment will only increase uncertainty and the risk of not being able to effectively address Arctic warming.”
But some cooperation in the Arctic continues for now. Vladimir Romanovsky, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who studies permafrost temperatures, relied on data from Russian scientists. This year, his team has achieved results, but whether his Russian collaborators will be able to make measurements in 2023 is unclear, Romanovsky said. “It’s changing so fast, so fast, that we don’t know what’s going to happen then.”
Most Russian researchers Romanovsky knew were struggling for funding. Currently, there is enough money to keep his collaborators working, but not enough for field trips. Cutting off communications and data sharing among Russian scientists is a “big problem,” Romanovsky said. They are now almost entirely excluded from international meetings and collaborations, he noted.
In the long run, Romanovsky thinks the Russian scientific community could lose many young researchers, as happened when the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s. “They just went elsewhere,” he said, leaving to find work in other fields to continue supporting their families. He and many others hope this does not happen again.
