Inside the desperate rush to save decades of US scientific data from deletion

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 organisations bent on downloading and archiving public data before it disappears.

"You get a message at 11 o'clock at night saying, 'This is going down tomorrow'," she says. "You try to enjoy your day and then everything goes wrong. You just spend the night downloading data."

Richards is a data and inclusion specialist, and civic science fellow at the Open Environmental Data Project (OEDP), a non-profit based in Hudson, New York. Her organisation is a founding member of the Public Environmental Data Project (PEDP), which emerged in 2024 to safeguard data under the Trump administration.

Some of the messages are "heart-breaking", says Richards. Scientists sometimes get in touch, desperate to know that data they have spent their professional lives collecting will be rescued. "You hear the urgency," she says. "You understand that this is someone's X amount of years of research and this is their baby. That's probably why we snap into action."

In recent weeks, Richards and her colleagues have archived datasets packed with information on US flood hazards, greenhouse gas emissions, energy production and environmental justice, among other subjects. Other researchers have recreated a tool that forecasts the risk of future climate hazards around the US.

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.

Multiple organisations including the Internet Archive, a non-profit, Safeguarding Research and Culture, and the Data Rescue Project, are now engaged in activities alongside the OEDP to rescue this data from oblivion. Many of the individuals involved in these efforts have pitched in voluntarily. "It's our library," says Richards. "You gotta save the books, you have to keep it for the future."

Shortly after President Trump's inauguration on 25 January 2025, his administration announced sweeping changes to federal departments and agencies, in a bid to reduce what it called "waste" and "inefficiencies". But many of the programmes and resources currently disappearing are critically important, scientists say. Climate researchers who spoke to the BBC pointed out that some deleted datasets have supported important research on climate change and life-threatening weather extremes, for example.

While government officials also removed information during Trump's first term, meaning scientists had expected similar deletions during his second term, the scale and scope of recent deletions has taken researchers by surprise. One scientist rushed to their university with a plea: "I said, 'I need disk space, I need it fast, I can't really go through the normal processes [of getting] a grant'," they recall. Their university quietly made 20 terabytes of storage available, the researcher told the BBC.

The scramble to rescue at-risk data before it's too late continues apace. Richards says her organisation has received messages from around 400 would-be volunteers and they are currently "on-boarding" around 100 of them. Their work could help preserve data on everything from air quality to coral reefs.

Among the tools that the PEDP has replicated on its website is EJScreen, an environmental justice mapping service that reveals communities in the US that may be at heightened risk from environmental hazards such as air pollution. It was removed from the US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) website in early February.

Climate data is often particularly challenging to work with given the huge size of certain datasets – vast stores of information about our planet that underpin climate models, or weather forecasting systems, for example. But this doesn't deter Richards. "This is taxpayer-funded research that was already paid for," she says. The BBC contacted the White House for a comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

Watching all of this unfold – in many cases in disbelief – are the scientists who worked to collect this data in the first place.

"I have never seen anything like this in nearly 40 years of doing science," says Paul Bierman, a geomorphologist at the University of Vermont. "I think it's an unmitigated disaster." Bierman studies landscape change and human interaction with landscapes. He has researched the history of the Greenland ice sheet, showing, for example, that during the Pleistocene epoch 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago, Greenland was covered in tundra and vegetation, rather than a thick ice sheet. It suggests that the ice in Greenland is more vulnerable to a changing climate than we previously understood.

Bierman explains that all of the data that he and his colleagues have collected on National Science Foundation-funded studies gets submitted to data repositories supported by that same US government agency. "Now I'm wondering, 'Is that the safest place for my data?'," he says.

Scientists are also worried that efforts to gather new climate data will fall by the wayside. A government report in March suggested that the Trump administration was considering cancelling the lease of the support office for a major carbon dioxide (CO2) monitoring research station in Hawaii. The Mauna Loa observatory has been tracking atmospheric CO2 concentrations since 1958 and just last year recorded the largest jump in such levels since records began.

"Climate science is only possible because of long-term datasets," says Lilian Dove, a US Noaa climate and global change research fellow at Brown University. "Without continuing to collect that data, preserve that data, our field is in really big trouble."

Both Bierman and Dove say they have made multiple copies of their scientific data, including in offline stores, as a precaution – to ensure its survival.

Eric Nost, a geographer at the University of Guelph in Canada, says that the data deletions have far exceeded the many revisions of US government-published information that occurred during Trump's first term, from early 2017 to early 2021. "We saw the removal of many [web] pages," he says. "We didn't really see datasets removed."

Rachel Santarsiero, director of the Climate Change Transparency Project at the National Security Archive, a non-governmental and non-profit organisation, agrees. She adds that, during that first term, mentions of "climate change" were often deleted from government websites but scientific data generally remained intact and accessible.

Santarsiero also notes, however, that – in principle – the removal of environmental data resources from public-facing government websites is neither new nor exclusive to the Trump administration. The EPA announced plans to remove its online archive in 2022 while President Joe Biden was in power, for instance. "Their rationale was it was too costly to keep the archive," says Santarsiero.

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Another organisation that is currently working to gather and archive US government data, including climate data, is Safegaur.de. It is run largely by researchers outside the US. William Waites, a computer scientist at the University of Southampton in the UK, is among them. The pace of data deletions in recent months and weeks has been frantic, he says, with some "scares" over datasets that were rumoured to be earmarked for removal.

In March, word went round that information published by Noaa would disappear within days. Waites and his colleagues swung into action and started downloading multiple terabytes of data. But the rumoured deadline for the deletion came and went. Waites describes the episode as "a good exercise for getting used to doing this" and adds: "It's getting a little bit easier, though, as we become more established and known for doing this – and have contacts in various organisations".

A raft of Noaa programmes are currently at risk as the Trump administration is reportedly considering cutting the agency's funding by 25%. This would remove all funding for research on the impact of climate change on weather, for example.

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which captures screenshots of web pages to record what they looked like in the past, is also working to cache government data. This is part of the End of Term Archive project, which records the state of US government websites at the end of presidential administrations. Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, highlights a live public spreadsheet that his colleagues are using to log such captures. The content ranges from information about LGBTQ+ equality matters to geopolitics. Plus, references to vaccines and sexually transmitted diseases were also removed from federal websites shortly after Trump's inauguration.

Many of the preserved web pages feature climate or environmental information. "We've seen, by scope and scale, an increase in the material removed from US government websites that is without precedent," says Graham.

Downloading and archiving data in private or non-governmental repositories is something of a double-edged sword, however. On the one hand, it allows archivists to make multiple copies of that data. "That limits its potential for being destroyed," says Lourdes Vera, a sociologist at the University at Buffalo. But Vera, who was arrested in 2020 for stealing and vandalising Trump campaign signs, points out that saving such data on platforms owned by US-based tech companies could be risky, if those companies are later compelled by the government to delete the data.

Multiple people involved in archiving initiatives expressed a motivation to store the most important information outside of the US. Though many were hesitant to discuss details. When asked whether this is something the Internet Archive is doing, for example, Graham only says: "The Internet Archive is always looking for responsible ways to help ensure the integrity of data".

There's another problem, though. When data goes missing from centralised – and well-known – government web pages, it's not always obvious to casual internet users that there are organisations out there working to republish it.

"You kind of have to know what you're looking for now whereas, in the past, you would have been able to more easily come by [that data] by navigating centralised data systems," says Nost.

It means an increasing burden not just in terms of safeguarding climate data – but also in ensuring that the public knows it is still there. And that it matters.

Given the relatively small window that humans have to act on climate change, in order to prevent its worst effects, Bierman finds the present situation incomprehensible.

"It's stunning to me that, at a time when we're seeing more intense hurricanes, greater rainfall extremities, more drought, more wildfires – why at that point would we ever imagine cutting the science that is key to addressing those issues, and keeping people safe?"

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