Claire G. Griffin

The logo for LGBTQ+STEM Day, with the hashtags below and the date 18 of November, over a rainbow background

Happy International Day of LGBTQIA+ People In STEM!

How are you celebrating it?

#LGBTQSTEMDay #PrideInSTEM

Occasional reminder that if you're interested in the history and practice of scientific writing, and folks who give advice about scientific writing, I made a starter pack: go.bsky.app/TwZVnjU

Like some kind of grim Omen of things to come, #Hawaii ’s #Kilauea volcano just unleashed a MASSIVE WING SHAPED eruption with lava fountains soaring 1,500+ feet high

⚒️🧪 Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (among other programs) to be eliminated at University of Nebraska-Lincoln #UNL. A tragedy all around. #Geosciences

They are really planning to go through with these cuts at Nebraska, despite recommendations not to. Unbelievable.

If you want to hire highly qualified, very successful earth and atmospheric sciences faculty in teaching and research, quite a few are probably looking for jobs for next year.

Trump's campaign to kill an industry where America runs a massive trade surplus is succeeding

This whole piece is all the actual horribles on parade, and this one is just infuriating

Jim Ryan letter

Jim Ryan wrote a letter to UVA detailing his "resignation" and I'm gonna get some fresh tea before I read it because I feel pretty certain I'm gonna be filled with righteous anger by the end

I'll do a thread but here's the full letter provided by the chronicle

www.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

Picture of shark sculpture by MICA student Mayali Geyling.

Picture of shark sculpture by MICA student Mayali Geyling.

Are you located in the DC-Baltimore-Philadelphia-New York corridor?

Have you always wanted to have your very own 11 foot long papier-mâché hammerhead shark?

Now available for free!

Perfect for museums, community centers, or your living room!

Save this lovely creature from imminent destruction!

U.S. NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR ALEXANDRIA, VA 22314 STAFF MEMORANDUM Fri 11/14/2025 10:47 AM OD 25-68 November 14, 2025 ORGANIZATION SUBJECT: U.S. National Science Foundation Headquarters Update Today, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) is announcing the award of a lease for the new U.S. National Science Foundation headquarters building at 401 Dulany Street, Alexandria, VA. This building, known as the "Randolph Building" is a part of the Carlyle Innovation Campus, where we will co-locate with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The new building is approximately 0.5 miles East of our current headquarters and approximately 0.3 miles away from the King Street-Old Town Metro and Virginia Railway Express (VRE) station. Many of you may already be familiar with the campus. We expect the new lease to begin on January 1, 2026, and it is our intent to move as quickly as possible so that we minimize costs to the agency. GSA is working on the overall schedule, and there is preparatory work that needs to be done to get the building ready for our occupancy, including cabling, furniture, and other basic modifications. We will be updating you on those plans as they are available. We intend to use all available flexibilities, including telework, as we execute the move in the first quarter of 2026. Thank you in advance for your patience, and we hope to have additional details for you at the town hall next week. Brian Stone Chief of Staff Performing the Duties of the Director

BREAKING: NSF will be relocating to the "Randolph Building," about half a mile from its current location in Alexandria, where they will co-locate with the US Patent and Trademark Office. The lease will begin January 1, 2026.

Below is a transcription of an email shared with me by NSF staff.

An illustrated cover of the Forgotten Beasts of Eld from a couple decades ago. Its a painting of a young fair-haired woman in profile with a falcon and green dragon on the foreground, and a boar and black swan in the midground, in front of a mountainous landscape

A badly photoshop cover of the Forgotten Beasts of eld. It still features mountains, a blond woman, a green dragon, and a falcon but it looks very poorly designed and even the text is a little hard to read because of the color choices

I recently re-read Forgotten Beasts of Eld, a beautiful little book.

The cover of the paperback copy i had in high school is the first image. The cover of the current Amazon listing is the second.

What happened??? This half-assed photoshop slop can't have been worth it.

Jim Ryan's letter is not just surreal and troubling; it provides a series of deeply sobering lessons—about the perils facing public universities today; about what it means to "work with" this Department of Justice; & about what leadership does (and doesn't) entail at this especially fraught moment.

The thing is, 1.5 degrees was was an unrealistic target from the start. The only way earth system models could make it work was by overshooting the target, getting to 0 emissions, and then devoting 2-3x the land area of India to carbon removal later in the century. We’d already warmed 1.2 degrees C.

A reminder, to myself and others, as our federal colleagues return to work, the backlog will be huge, and they didn't just come back from vacation, they are coming back from something that has impacted each of them in their own way

I know I am eager to talk to many of them, but lets all be patient

A Folio Edition of the memoir Pigs I Have Known

I try my hardest to stop buying books but sometimes it is just too difficult.

Another community resource loss: "Sunset of the IRI Data Library" 😔

Every generation gets to recreate the environmental movement to suit its own purposes Some big-picture reactions to a recent NYT piece

There was an NYT piece last week about the Sierra Club, and (by extension) the current state of the climate movement.

I think they got three big things wrong.

davekarpf.substack.com/p/every-gene...

Map showing which 3-month period has warmed the most over the last 75 years. For most places in North America - except for the U.S. Rocky Mountains and West Coast - one of the cold season periods is the one that has warmed the most.
@alaskawx.bsky.social

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

A bright red glow reaches up into the darkness, illuminating the silhouettes of tall slightly scraggly, spruce trees

Swirls of green and red light sweep down from the sky, lighting up the forest and contrasting against the Stark silhouettes of trees

Dramatic swirls of green and red light swirl down from the middle of the sky, starkly contrasting against the bear of Poplar, tall Spruce trees.

Still more dramatic curtains of light sweep down from above in sheets of green and red. The tall bear poplars and spruce spires our starkly silhouetted.

I really need to get to bed, but I just poked my head out the back door again. This is the view from my deck. All of this is looking south. When the geomagnetic storms are like this, the oval overshoots me and stretches into the US, which is why so many are seeing it tonight. #aurora

No pressure! But you'd make at least one former southern Oregon resident very happy :)

A 3-D printed Relie of Mount Saint Helens post eruption turned into a tissue box cover or the bottom half of the cube says Lawetlat’la in natl Forest script (the Cowlitz name for St Helens) and Mount St Helens in Ariel font. Text is inset in forest service trapezoid sign with rounded edges. This box has a silk pastel color palette of gold red and dark copper.

It’s been a crazy busy semester, but I’m cranking up production of my LiDAR-derived, 3D-printed volcano tissue box covers for the holidays. I hope to have a massive offering (50+) sometime near Thanksgiving. Here’s a sneak peak Will also have Etna and Stromboli! Etsy link in my profile.

Any chance you'll do crater lake/mazama? Ive been longing for one of my favorite cascades peak for ages!

Gorgeous red and green aurorae over a lighted city below.

Gorgeous picture of red and green aurorae over a lighted city below.

I am on my way home to Toronto and the aurorae are absolutely phenomenal.

If you are anywhere in the northern half of the continent, get outside and look up! Or better still, put your camera on a 10 second exposure and point it up.

North and preferably dry enough that its not cloudy every single time!

ai could never

Cloudiest! Autocorrect, arrgh

Why do I live in one of the cloudless parts of the country??

Faint aurora visible with a long exposure in Knoxville, TN!

A pink and green Aurora

You can see it in Seattle!!