When it became clear that the Trump administration was going to take power, word started to spread throughout the government-sanctioned scientific communities. Everyone was secretly advising each other to save their data in third-party locations, to backup their climate data. Maps of the worst polluters in America needed to be saved, as did anything that seemingly promoted green energies over fossil fuels simply because those green energies are superior.
It was no secret that the Trump administration planned to massively overhaul the government when they took power, and fearing their agencies would be reduced or eliminated altogether, many scientists started pushing files and data off their government computers to archive sites. Even some hackers got in on the archiving to prevent any premature deletions, and there was a ton of data to save. It is still unknown if all of it was saved, which points to the fact that something must have gotten lost.
However, vanishing citations is another thing altogether. They pose a much greater threat than the loss of a few government-run scientific websites. The loss of the citations is an effort from the Trump team to limit access to scientific data in order to prevent lawmakers from making good policy decisions. This sort of data censorship has occurred before, but the level it’s occurring now is quite alarming, especially from such a young administration.
The vast majority of the scientific community agrees that the Arctic is warming at a rate nearly double the global average. In fact, it was recently announced that winter sea ice levels in the Arctic were at their lowest ever in recorded history. Without sea ice in the Arctic, the life that requires it will soon die out, including polar bears and other such valued creatures. Some people have even had to abandon their homes as a result of the eroding coast line in very northern areas.
Data is scarce in these regions because there are so few researchers up there collecting it, which makes it that much more valuable. Data from the Arctic region must be made available to scientists who study such data in the continental United States. Without it, the government will not be prepared for the changes that can and will occur if humanity continues down the same path.
One Arctic researcher conveys this quite well. According to her, many of the maps of the American Arctic region haven’t been updated since World War II, and only about one percent of the waters in the region have been surveyed using modern equipment and measuring standards. That means the majority of her journeys are through uncharted waters.
Unfortunately, she has been the victim of the vanishing citations seemingly issued by the Trump administration. What little data she is able to collect is essentially lost to the public. She noticed it at first on the 21st of January, directly into the start of the Trump administration’s control. Links to her data online were coming up red, and soon she realized most of it had been removed. The data still had to exist somewhere, but the links had been killed, effectively hiding the data.
The initial surge of deletions that took place right after Trump took power has been replaced by a consistent deleting of data from a number of scientific government websites, including just about everything to do with the Arctic region. Now, the researcher who created most of that data receives constant requests for another citation, but she usually has to turn them down. Very little of her data was archived anywhere. She can only advance hoping her data stays online while backing up everything herself.