See how Russia’s war in Ukraine is still reshaping global science?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February shocked the world. Images of civilians fleeing their homes, broken bodies strewn across city streets, apartment complexes and memorials have been flooding the news and social media ever since. This war killed ten thousand people and killed eighteen million people.

Wars are not fought in a vacuum. The ripple effects of the war in Ukraine range from skyrocketing energy and food supplies to environmental damage and the threat of a nuclear disaster (SN: 7/2/22, p. 6; SN Online: 3/7/22), felt around the globe — especially among two other crises, the coronavirus pandemic and ongoing climate change.

“The collision of all these crises together is very dangerous for the world,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, said in May.

We often look to science for solutions to the world’s problems. But this tectonic shift in the geopolitical landscape has ended global scientific cooperation, leaving many researchers scrambling to find a solid footing. While the outcome of this change — like the outcome of the war itself — is uncertain, here are some examples of how the conflict has affected science and research.

Science in the war zone

Ukraine’s infrastructure sustained heavy damage from the initial attack. Hospitals, universities and research institutions were not spared.

Some scientists have fled to other countries while about half remain in Ukraine, as male researchers between the ages of 18 and 60 are expected to serve in the military, says George Gamota, a US-based scientist who advises the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences. . Gamota was born in Ukraine and moved to the United States as a child. He joins his relatives with his native land. When Ukraine became an independent country in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian government helped build its scientific infrastructure.

“When Russia attacked Ukraine, all hell broke loose. This situation is not really stable,” Gamota says.

Research funding in Ukraine has declined by 50 percent, he says. Scientific bodies across the globe have stepped in to provide support through grants, job opportunities and transfer programs. But financial support, whether it is from the Ukrainian government or independent organizations, is still too long to reach the pockets of individuals, says Gamota. “Some people are not getting anything.”

The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine was already looking at how to build it. In September, the organization met with its counterparts in Europe and the United States. Latvia, Poland and other places are described how after the end of the Soviet Union, Gamota was restored. “I think it’s important to have an army. But probably what the Ukrainians were asking is how the world can help us now.”

In March, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation had donated $1 million to directly support Ukrainian researchers. The organization donated an additional $2 million in October to the rebuilding efforts, a move that Gamota calls “fantastic.”

Slowdowns to physics and space

While science in Ukraine has been struggling as the war drags on, science in Russia has become increasingly isolated. Sanctions from Western countries have directly and indirectly targeted Russian scientific enterprise.

In June, the White House Office of Science and Technology announced that the United States would “step down” collaborations with Russia, following an earlier ban on US technology exports there. The plan applies to national labs, as well as projects that receive federal money and involve Russian government-affiliated universities and research institutes. Many research institutions in the West have also cut ties with collaborators in Russia.

These steps have particularly affected some large-scale collaborations in space research and physical research.

There were launch delays and a shutdown period for at least one space telescope (SN: 3/26/22, p. 6). The International Space Station, which is jointly run by NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, however, continues to operate normally for now.

In the world of high-energy physics research, the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva has announced that it will not renew its international cooperation agreements with Russia and Belarus, which support the Russian invasion, when the contracts expire in 2024.

When that happens, about 8 percent of CERN staff affiliated with Russian institutions, equating to about 1,000 researchers, are unable to use CERN facilities. And Russia will stop contributing to the experiments.

These plans strongly condemn the intrusion “while leaving the door open for continued scientific cooperation in the future.” of ongoing theoretical research, in dark matter (included) (SN: 7/2/22, p. 18). But new works are forbidden.

Science outside of Ukraine and Russia has not escaped the geopolitical economic crisis. Rising energy costs – spurred by Russia’s cutback in natural gas exports – prompt European research labs to use energy canada, newspaper nature reported in October. CERN is a major consumer, using the equivalent of Geneva’s average energy consumption of about a third of its annual consumption.

The lab is running its largest accelerator on November 28, two weeks ahead of schedule, to reduce its electrical load on the grid and prepare for rising prices and winter power shortages. CERN officials have announced that the number of particle collisions will decrease in 2023, the competition between accelerator researchers to tighten the time; nature he reported

The war also put pressure on the already faltering global supply chain, which caused shortages and shipping delays. Delays have created snags in the construction of ITER, the world’s largest nuclear fusion experiment that is set to open in 2025, in France. “We’ve been through thick and thin with this plan, and we’ll do it,” said ITER spokesman Sabine Griffith. ITER had been waiting for the ring magnet and other equipment from Russia, one of seven allies with the European Union and the United States of America. Due to intergovernmental agreements, Russia is still part of the project. But now everything is covered with ice, says Griffith.

A chilling effect of arctic research

Northern Russia is home to about two-thirds of the land’s frozen ground, or permafrost. Collectively, the world’s permafrost contains about twice as much carbon as there is in the atmosphere. With temperatures in the eastern Arctic nearly four times the global average, the region’s permafrost has warmed.

By the end of this century, the defrosted soil could exhale 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide and methane, according to some estimates.SN Online: 9/25/19). To better understand how climate change is reshaping the Arctic and vice versa, researchers need accurate measurements of carbon, temperature, microbial communities and more.

But the deteriorating relationship between the West and Russia is “a major key to bringing together data so we can get the clearest picture of the entire Arctic,” says Ted Schuur, an ecologist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff and principal investigator of the Permafrost Carbon Network. Now that much of the arctic permafrost is inaccessible, Schuur and colleagues are looking for sites in North America and Europe that he says could serve as a proxy for permafrost.

Terminated collaborations, while intended to “punish” Russia, actually affect the global Arctic community by limiting researchers’ access to scientific information and undermine Arctic (including notably Indigenous) communities,” Nikolay Korchunov, Russia’s ambassador-at-large for Arctic affairs, wrote in an email. New Sciences.

Korchunov chairs the Arctic Council, an eight-member intergovernmental body that acts as the region’s steward, forging agreements on oil cleanup, trade, wildlife conservation, climate change research and more. In March, the other seven members of the council — Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Norway and the United States — announced that they would suspend collaboration with Russia.

The work between the so-called “7 Arctic” continues. But the long-planned biodiversity of Russia — and monitoring projects on pollution, said Korchunov. “The cold scientific environment only increases uncertainty and the risk of an ineffective response to Arctic warming.”

But some cooperation in the Arctic has already continued. Vladimir Romanovsky is a geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who studies the temperature of permafrost and relies on data obtained in Russia. This year, the team got its results, but whether the Russian partners will be able to take the measurements in 2023 is uncertain, Romanovsky says. “So much is changing, so quickly, that we don’t know what will happen next.”

Most of the researchers in Russia who know Romanovsky are struggling with funding. At the moment, there is enough money to hire helpers, but not enough to make the field. Blocking Russian scientists from communicating and sharing information is “a big, big problem,” Romanovsky says. They are now almost completely excluded from international meetings and collaborations.

In the long run, Romanovsky thinks that Russian scientists may lose many young researchers, just like what happened in the 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed. “They just go to another place,” he said, leaving in other fields to continue working to support their families. He and many others do not hope for the future.