Because of the ongoing federal government shutdown, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced it would cancel the U.S. Antarctic research program for this year, LiveScience reported.

Since the federal government has still yet to pass a bill approving the national budget, millions of dollars of planned research will fall by the wayside. Contractors and scientists are out of work and being sent home. Graduate students may have to attend school longer because they could not retrieve their data to complete a project.

All that is being left is a small amount of staff members, but their only responsibility, like many vacated government agencies, is to maintain the equipment.

The Antarctic research program was cancelled Tuesday and some scientists, like Northern Illinois University's Ross Powell, were frustrated because of the short summer window.

"It makes the blood boil," said Powell, who lead the WISSARD project, discovering life in an Antarctic lake buried in ice.

Powell has also started a project in which the NSF has already invested $10 million. "If we don't get this field season, basically, we've wasted half the money," he said.

Dawn Sumner, a University of California Davis geobiologist, is on schedule to leave Antarctica Oct. 17 because of the shutdown. Her work is very much affected by timing in the Antarctic summer and her work still can be salvaged, so she is waiting for Congress to "get its act together."

"Mine is somewhat time-sensitive; we can't do it in midsummer," Sumner said of her research on microbial life in Antarctic lakes. "Although I am very disappointed in losing some, possibly all, of my research, the impacts on other people's health and safety are much more dire."

Also in danger of being cancelled for the year is NASA's Operation IceBridge. The project calculates and tracks ice thickness and density in relation to climate change. Scientists said interrupting the data collection will make it more difficult to project future models.