A quiet crisis..as scientists rush to save valuable data being deleted by the Visigoths currently running our country.
Swathes of scientific data deletions are sweeping across US government websites – with decades of research at risk. Now, scientists are racing to save their work before it's lost.
www.bbc.com
Swathes of scientific data deletions are sweeping across US government websites – with decades of health, climate change and extreme weather research at risk. Now, scientists are racing to save their work before it's lost.
Some of them are in the US. Others are scattered around the world. There are hundreds, many even thousands of people involved across multiple networks. And they keep a damn close eye on their phones.
No one knows when the next alert or request to save a chunk of US government-held climate data will come in. Such data, long available online,
keeps getting taken down by US President Donald Trump's administration. For the last six months or so, Cathy Richards has been entrenched in the response. She works for one of several organizations bent on downloading and archiving public data before it disappears.
This rush to safeguard vital environmental data is part of a broader movement to rescue all kinds of scientific data published online by the US government. Biomedical and health researchers working with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for example, have been
frantically searching for ways to back up important data following executive orders issued by Trump about what information on
gender and
diversity may be
published by federal bodies.
Scientists have expressed fears about a wide range of resources that might go next – from
historical weather records to data gathered
by Nasa satellites. On 16 April, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) announced that a list of datasets regarding ocean monitoring were now
scheduled to be removed in early May.
